LANGUAGE 

ITS  NATURE 
DEVELOPMENT 
AND      ORIGIN 


OTTO    JESPERSEN 

PROFESSOR    IN    THE    UNIVERSITY    OF    COPENHAGEN 


NEW   YORK 

HENRY    HOLT   AND    COMPANY 

1922 


jT"   V 


I 


TO 

VILHELM    THOMSEN 


A^Sl^f^ 


Olaede,  nSr  av  andres  mund 
jeg  hjjTrte  de  tanker  store, 

Glaede  over  hvert  et  fund 

jeg  selv  ved  min  forsken  gjorde. 


PREFACE 


The  distinctive  feature  of  the  science  of  language  as  conceived 
nowadays  is  its  historical  character  :  a  language  or  a  word  is  no 
longer  taken  as  something  given  once  for  all,  but  as  a  result  of 
previous  development  and  at  the  same  time  as  the  starting-point 
for  subsequent  development.  This  manner  of  viewing  languages 
constitutes  a  decisive  improvement  on  the  way  in  which  languages 
were  dealt  with  in  previous  centuries,  and  it  suffices  to  mention 
such  words  as  '  evolution  '  and  '  Darwinism  '  to  show  that  linguistic 
research  has  in  this  respect  been  in  full  accordance  with  tendencies 
observed  in  many  other  branches  of  scientific  work  during  the  last 
hundred  years.  Still,  it  cannot  be  said  that  students  of  language 
have  always  and  to  the  fullest  extent  made  it  clear  to  themselves 
what  is  the  real  essence  of  a  language.  Too  often  expressions  are 
used  which  are  nothing  but  metaphors — in  many  cases  perfectly 
harmless  metaphors,  but  in  other  cases  metaphors  that  obscure 
the  real  facts  of  the  matter.  Language  is  frequently  spoken  of 
as  a  '  living  organism  '  ;  we  hear  of  the  '  life  '  of  languages,  of 
the  '  birth  '  of  new  languages  and  of  the  '  death  '  of  old  languages, 
and  the  implication,  though  not  always  realized,  is  that  a  language 
is  a  living  thing,  something  analogous  to  an  animal  or  a  plant. 
Yet  a  language  evidently  has  no  separate  existence  in  the  same 
way  as  a  dog  or  a  beech  has,  but  is  nothing  but  a  function  of 
certain  living  human  beings.  Language  is  activity,  purposeful 
activity,  and  we  should  never  lose  sight  of  the  speaking  individuals 
and  of  their  purpose  in  acting  in  this  particular  way.  When 
people  speak  of  the  life  of  words — as  in  celebrated  books  \%dth  such 
titles  as  La  vie  des  mots,  or  Biographies  of  Words — they  do 
not  always  keep  in  view  that  a  word  has  no  '  life  '  of  its  own  : 
it  exists  only  in  so  far  as  it  is  pronounced  or  heard  or  remembered 
by  somsbody,  and  this  kind  of  existence  cannot  properly  be  com- 
pared with  '  life  '  in  the  original  and  proper  sense  of  that  word. 
The  only  unimpeachable  definition  of  a  word  is  that  it  is  a  human 
habit,  an  habitual  act  on  the  part  of  one  human  individual  which 
has,  or  may  have,  the  effect  of  evoking  some  idea  in  the  mind 

7 


8  LANGUAGE 

of  another  individual.  A  word  thus  may  be  rightly  compared 
with  such  an  habitual  act  as  taking  off  one's  hat  or  raising  one's 
fingers  to  one's  cap  :  in  both  cases  we  have  a  certain  set  of  mus- 
cular activities  which,  when  seen  or  heard  by  somebody  else, 
shows  him  what  is  passing  in  the  mind  of  the  original  agent  or 
what  he  desires  to  bring  to  the  consciousness  of  the  other  man 
(or  men).  The  act  is  individual,  but  the  interpretation  presupposes 
that  the  individual  forms  part  of  a  community  with  analogous 
habits,  and  a  language  thus  is  seen  to  be  one  particular  set  of 
human  customs  of  a  well-defined  social  character. 

It  is  indeed  possible  to  speak  of  '  life  '  in  connexion  with 
language  even  from  this  point  of  view,  but  it  will  be  in  a  different 
sense  from  that  in  which  the  word  was  taken  b}'  the  older  school 
of  linguistic  science.  I  shall  try  to  give  a  biological  or  biographical 
science  of  language,  but  it  will  be  through  sketching  the  linguistic 
biology  or  biography  of  the  speaking  individual.  I  shall  give, 
therefore,  a  large  part  to  the  way  in  which  a  child  learns  his  mother 
tongue  (Book  II)  :  my  conclusions  there  are  chiefly  based  on  the 
rich  material  I  have  collected  during  manj'  j-ears  from  direct 
observation  of  many  Danish  children,  and  particularly^  of  my 
own  boy,  Frans  (see  my  book  Nutid  sprog  hos  born  og  voxne,  Copen- 
hagen, 1916).  Unfortunately,  I  have  not  been  able  to  make  first- 
hand observations  with  regard  to  the  speech  of  English  children  ; 
the  English  examples  I  quote  are  taken  second-hand  either  from 
notes,  for  which  I  am  obliged  to  English  and  American  friends, 
or  from  books,  chiefly  by  psychologists.  I  should  be  particiilarly 
happy  if  my  remarks  could  induce  some  English  or  American 
linguist  to  take  up  a  systematic  study  of  the  speech  of  children, 
or  of  one  child.  This  study  seems  to  me  very  fascinating  indeed, 
and  a  linguist  is  sure  to  notice  many  things  that  would  be  passed 
by  as  uninteresting  even  by  the  closest  observer  among  psycholo- 
gists, but  which  may  have  some  bearing  on  the  life  and  development 
of  language. 

Another  part  of  linguistic  biology  deals  \nth  the  influence 
of  the  foreigner,  and  still  another  with  the  changes  which  the 
individual  is  apt  independently  to  introduce  into  his  speech  even 
after  he  has  fully  acquired  his  mother-tongue.  Tliis  naturallj' 
leads  up  to  the  question  whether  all  these  changes  introduced  by 
various  individuals  do,  or  do  not,  follow  the  same  line  of  direction, 
and  whether  mankind  has  on  the  whole  moved  forward  or  not  in 
linguistic  matters.  The  con\action  reached  through  a  study  cf 
historically  accessible  periods  of  well-knoAMi  languages  is  finally 
shown  to  throw  some  light  on  the  disputed  problem  of  the  ultimate 
origin  of  human  language. 

Parts  of  my  theory  of  sound-change,  and  especially  mj'^  objections 


PREFACE  9 

to  the  dogma  of  blind  sound-laws,  date  back  to  my  very  first 
linguistic  paper  (1886)  ;  most  of  the  chapters  on  Decay  or  Progress 
and  parts  of  some  of  the  following  chapters,  as  well  as  the  theory 
of  the  origin  of  speech,  may  be  considered  a  new  and  revised 
edition  of  the  general  chapters  of  my  Progress  in  Language  (1894). 
Many  of  the  ideas  contained  in  this  book  thus  are  not  new  with 
me  ;  but  even  if  a  reader  of  my  previous  works  may  recognize 
things  which  he  has  seen  before,  I  hope  he  will  admit  that  they 
have  been  here  worked  up  with  much  new  material  into  something 
like  a  sj'stem,  which  forms  a  fairly  comprehensive  theory  of 
linguistic  development. 

Still,  I  have  not  been  able  to  compress  into  this  volume  the 
whole  of  my  pliilosophy  of  speech.  Considerations  of  space  have 
obliged  me  to  exclude  the  chapters  I  had  first  intended  to  write 
on  the  practical  consequences  of  the  '  energetic  '  view  of  language 
wliich  I  have  throughout  maintained  ;  the  estimation  of  linguistic 
phenomena  implied  in  that  view  has  bearings  on  such  questions 
as  these  :  What  is  to  be  considered  '  correct '  or  '  standard  '  in 
matters  of  pronunciation,  spelling,  grammar  and  idiom  ?  Can  (or 
should)  indi%'iduals  exert  themselves  to  improve  their  mother-tongue 
by  enriching  it  with  new  terms  and  by  making  it  purer,  more  i^recise, 
more  fit  to  express  subtle  shades  of  thought,  more  easy  to  handle 
in  speech  or  in  writing,  etc.  ?  (A  few  hints  on  such  questions  may 
be  found  in  my  paper  "  Energetik  der  Sprache  "  in  Scientia,  1914.) 
Is  it  possible  to  construct  an  artificial  language  on  scientific  prin- 
ciples for  international  use  ?  (On  this  question  I  may  here  briefly 
state  my  conviction  that  it  is  extremely  important  for  the  whole 
of  mankind  to  have  such  a  language,  and  that  I(iais  scientificallj' 
and  practically  very  much  superior  to  all  previous  attempts, 
Volapiik,  Esperanto,  Idiom  Neutral,  Latin  sine  flexione,  etc.  But 
I  have  written  more  at  length  on  that  question  elsewhere.)  With 
regard  to  the  sj^stem  of  grammar,  the  relation  of  grammar  to 
logic,  and  grammatical  categories  and  their  definition,  I  must  refer 
the  reader  to  Sprojefs  Logik  (Copenhagen,  1913),  and  to  the  first 
chapter  of  the  second  volume  of  my  Modern  English  Grammar 
(Heidelberg,  1914),  but  I  shall  hope  to  deal  with  these  questions 
more  in  detail  in  a  future  work,  to  be  called,  probably.  The  Logic 
of  Grammar,  of  which  some  chapters  have  been  ready  in  my 
drawers  for  some  years  and  others  are  in  active  preparation. 

I  have  prefixed  to  the  theoretical  chapters  of  this  work  a  short 
survey  of  the  history  of  the  science  of  language  in  order  to  show 
how  my  problems  have  been  previously  treated.  In  this  part 
(Book  I)  I  have,  as  a  matter  of  course,  used  the  excellent  works 
on  the  subject  by  Benfey,  Raumer,  Delbruck  [Einleihing  in  das 
Sprachstudium,  1st  ed.,  1880 ;   I  did  not  see  the  6th  ed.,  1908,  till 


r 


10  LANGUAGE 

my  own  chapters  on  the  history  of  linguistics  were  finished;, 
Thorasen,  Oertel  and  Pedersen.  But  I  have  in  nearly  every  case 
gone  to  the  sources  themselves,  and  have,  I  think,  found  interesting 
things  in  some  of  the  early  books  on  linguistics  that  have  been 
generally  overlooked  ;  I  have  even  pointed  out  some  writers  who 
had  passed  into  undeserved  oblivion.  My  intention  has  been  on 
the  whole  to  throw  into  relief  the  great  lines  of  development 
rather  than  to  give  many  details  ;  in  judging  the  first  part  of  my 
book  it  should  also  be  borne  in  mind  that  its  object  primarily  is 
to  serve  as  an  introduction  to  the  problems  dealt  with  in  tlic  rest 
of  the  book.  Throughout  I  have  tried  to  look  at  things  with  my 
own  eyes,  and  accordingly  my  views  on  a  great  many  points  are 
different  from  those  generally  accepted  ;  it  is  my  hope  that  an 
impartial  observer  will  find  that  I  have  here  and  there  succeeded 
in  distributing  light  and  shade  more  justly  than  my  predecessors. 

Wherever  it  has  been  necessary  I  have  transcribed  words 
phonetically  according  to  the  system  of  the  Association  Phonetique 
Internationale,  though  without  going  into  too  minute  distinction 
of  sounds,  the  object  being,  not  to  teach  the  exact  pronunciation 
of  various  languages,  but  rather  to  bring  out  clearly  the  insuffi- 
ciency of  the  ordinary  spelling.  The  latter  is  given  throughout  in 
italics,  while  phonetic  symbols  have  been  inserted  in  brackets  [.]. 
I  must  ask  the  reader  to  forgive  inconsistency  in  such  matters 
as  Greek  accents.  Old  English  marks  of  vowel-length,  etc.,  which 
I  have  often  omitted  as  of  no  importance  for  the  purpose  of  this 
volume. 

I  must  express  here  my  gratitude  to  the  directors  of  the 
Carlsbergfond  for  kind  support  of  my  work.  I  want  to  thank 
also  Professor  G.  C.  ^loore  Smith,  of  the  University  of  Sheffield  : 
not  only  has  he  sent  me  the  manuscript  of  a  translation  nf 
most  of  my  Nutidssprog,  which  he  had  undertaken  of  his  own 
accord  and  which  served  as  the  basis  of  Book  II,  but  he  has 
kindly  gone  through  the  whole  of  this  volume,  improving  and 
correcting  my  English  style  in  many  passages.  His  friendship  and 
the  untiring  interest  he  has  always  taken  in  my  work  have  been 
extremely  valuable  to  me  for  a  great  many  years. 

OTTO  JESPERSEN. 
University  of  Copenhagen, 
June  1921. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Preface        ........        7 

Abbreviations  of  Book  Titles,  Etc.    .  .  .  .13 

Phonetic  Symbols  .  .  .  .  .  .16 

BOOK    I 

HISTORY    OF    LINGUISTIC    SCIENCE 

CHAPTER 

I.  Before  1800         ......      19 

II.  Beginxixg  of  Nineteenth  Century  .  .      32 

III.  Middle  of  Nineteenth  Century        .  .  .63 

IV.  End  of  Nineteenth  Century  .  .  .89 

BOOK  II 

THE    CHILD 

V.  Sounds      .  .  .  .  .  .  .103 

VI.  Words      .......     113 

VII.  Grammar  .  .  .  .  .  .128 

VIII,  Some  Fundamental  Problems  .  .  .     140 

IX.     The    Influence    of    the    Child    on    Linguistic 

Development  ......     161 

X.     The  Influence  of  the  Child  {continued)     .  .     172 

u 


12 


LANGUAGE 


BOOK  in 
THE  INDIVIDUAL  AND  THE  WORLD 

OBAPTEB  FAOE 

XI.  The  Foreigner   .  .  .  .  .  .191 

XII.  Pidgin  and  Congeners  ....     216 

XIII.  The  Woman         .  .  .  .  .  .237 

XIV.  Causes  of  Change         .  .  .  .  .     255 
XV.  Causes  of  Change  (continued)             .            .  .     276 


BOOK    IV 

DEVELOPMENT    OF    LANGUAGE 

XVI.     Etymology           ......  305 

XVII.    Progress  or  Decay  ?     .            .            .            .            .  319 

XVIII.     Progress  .......  337 

XIX.     Origin  of  Grammatical  Elements     .            .            .  367 

XX.     Sound  Symbolism           .....  396 

XXI.     The  Origin  of  Speech  .  .  .  .  .412 

Index        .            .            .            .            .            .            .  4:,3 


ABBREVIATIONS   OF   BOOK   TITLES,   ETC. 


Bally  LV  ==  Ch.  Ballj-,  Le  Langage  et  la  Vie,  Gent;ve  1913. 

Benfey   Gesch  =  Th.    Benfey,    Oeschichte   der   Sprachwisaenschaft,   Miinchen 

1869. 
Bleek  CG  =  W.  H.  I.  Bleek,  Comparative  Grammar  of  South  African  Languages' 

London  1862-69. 
Bloonxfield  SL  =  L.  Bloomfield,  An  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Language, 

New  York  1914. 
Bopp  C  =  F.  Bopp,  Conjugationasystem  der  Sanskritsprache,  Frankfurt  1816. 
AC  =  Analytical  Comparison  (see  ch.  ii,  §  6). 
VG  =  Vergleichende  Orammatik,  2te  Ausg.,  Berlin  1857. 
Breal  M  =  M.  Breal,  Melanges  de  Mythologie  et  de  Linguistique,  Paris  1882. 
Brugmann  VG  =  K.    Brugmann,   Qrundriss  der   Vergleichenden  Grammatih, 
Strassburg  1886  fi.,  2te  Ausg.,   1897  £f. 
KG  =  Kurze  Vergleichende  Grammatik,  Strassburg  1904. 
ChE  =  O.  Jespersen,  Chapters  on  English,  London  1918. 
Churchill  B  =  W.  Churchill,  Beach-la-Mar,  Washington  1911. 
Curtius  C  =  G.    Cixrtius,    Zur    Chronologie    der    indogerm.    Sprachforschung, 
Leipzig  1873. 
K  =  Zur  Kritik  der  neuesten  Sprachforschung,  Leipzig  1885. 
Dauzat  V  =  A.  Dauzat,  La  Vie  du  Langage,  Paris  1910. 

Ph  =  La  Philosophic  du  Langage,  Paris  1912. 
Delbrvick  E  =  B.  Delbruck,  Einleitung  in  das  Sprachstudium,  Leipzig  1880  ; 
5te  Aufl.   1908. 
Grfr  =  Grundfragen  der  Sprachforschung,  Strassburg  1901. 
E.  =  English. 

EDD  =  J.  Wright,   The  English  Dialect  Dictionary,  Oxford  1898  £E. 
ESt  =  Englische  Sludien. 
Feist  KI  =  S.  Feist,  Kultur,  Ausbreitung  und  Herkunft  der  Jndogermanen, 

Berlin   1913. 
Fonetik  =  O.  Jespersen,  Fonetik,  Copenhagen  1897. 
Fr.  ==  French. 
Gabelentz  Spr  =  G.  v.  d.  Gabelentz,  Die  Sprachwissenschaft,  Leipzig  1891. 

Gr  =  Chinesische  Grammatik,  Leipzig  1881. 
Ginneken   LP  =  J.    v.    Ginneken,   Principes   de  Linguistique  Paychologique 

Amsterdam,  Paris  1907. 
Glencormer  =  P.  Glenconner,  The  Sayings  of  the  Children,  Oxford  1918. 
Gr.  =  Greek. 
Greenough  and  Kittredge  W  =  J.  B.  Greenough  and  G.  L.  Kittredge,  Words 

and  their  Ways  in  English  Speech,  London  1902. 
Grimm  Gr.  =  J.   Grimm,  Deutsche  Grammatik,  2te  Ausg.,  Gottingen  1822. 
GDS  =  Geschichte  der  dexitschen  Sprache,  4te  Aufl.,  Leipzig  1880. 

13 


14  LANGUAGE  \ 

GRM  =  Oermaniach-Romanische  Monataschrift. 

GS  =  O.  Jespersen,  Orowth  and  Structure  of  the  English  Language,  3rd  ed., 

Leipzig  1919. 
Hilmer  Sch  =  H.  Hilmer,  Schallnachahmung,   Wortschopfung  u.  Bedeutungs- 

wandel,  Halle  1914. 
Hirt  GDS  =  H.  Hirt,  Oeschichte  der  deutachen  Sprache,  Miinchen  1919. 

Idg  =  Die  Indogermanen,  Strnssburg  1905-7. 
Humboldt    Versch  =  W.    v.    Humboldt,     Verachiedenheit    dea    menachlichen 

Sprachbauea  (number  of  pages  as  in  the  original  edition). 
IF  =  Indogermanische  Forschungen. 

KZ  =  Kuhn's  Zeitachrift  fiir  vcrgleichende  Sprachforachung. 
Lasch   S  =  R.   Laaoh,   Bonder  a  prachen  u.   ihre  Entstehung,   Wien    1907. 
LPh  =  O.   Jesporsen,   Lehrbuch  der  Phonetik,   3te   Aufl.,   Leipzig   1920. 
Madvig  1857  =  J.  N.  Madvig,  De  grammalische  Betegnelaer,  Copenhagen  1857. 

Kl  =  Kleine  philologiache  Schriften,  Leipzig  1875. 
ME.  =  Middle  English. 

MEG  =  O.    Jespersen,    Modern   English   Grammar,    Heidelberg    1909,    1914. 
Meillet  DI  =  A.   Meillet,  Lea  Dialectea  Indo-Europeena,   Paris   1908. 

Germ.  =  Caracterea  gdm'raux  dea  Languea  Germaniques,  Paris  1917. 
Gr  =  Aper<^u  d'une  Histoire  de  la  Langue  Grecque,  Paris  1913. 
LI  =  Introduction   d   V4tude   camp,  dea  Languea   Indo-Europeennea, 
2e  dd.,  Paris  1908. 
Meinhof  Ham  =  C.  Meinhof,  Die  hamitischen  Sprachen,  Haml)urg  1912. 

MSA  =  Die  moderne  Sprachforachung  in  Afrika,  Berlin   1910. 
Meringer  L  =  R.  Meringer,  Aua  dem  Leben  der  Sprache,  Berlin  1908. 
Misteli  =  F.    Misteli,    Charakteriatik    der    haupta,    Typen    dea    Sprachbauea, 

Berlin  1893. 
MSL  =  M^moires  de  la  Socidtd  de  Linguiatique  de  Paria. 
Ft.  Miiller  Gr  =  Friedrich  Miiller,  Grundrisa  der  Spiachwiaaenachaft,  '\\'ien 

1876  ff. 
Max  Miiller  Ch  =  F.  Max  Miiller,  Chipa  from  a  German  Workahop,  vol.  iv, 

London  1875. 
NED  =  A   New  Engliah  Dictionary,  by  Murray,  etc.,   Oxford    1884  f5. 
Noreen  UL  =  A.   Noreen,   Abriaa  der  urgermaniachen  Lautlehre,   Strassburg 
1894. 
VS  =  Vart  Spr8k,  Lund  1903  ff. 
Nyrop   Gr  =  Kr.    Nyrop,    Grammaire   Hisiorique   de   la   Langue   Fran^aiae, 

Copenhagen  1914  ff. 
OE.  =  Old  English  (Anglo-Saxon). 

Oertel  =  H.  Oertel,  Lecturea  on  the  Study  of  Language,  New  York  190L 
OFr.  =  Old  French. 
ON.  =  Old  Norse. 

Passy  Ch  =  P.  Passy,  Lea  Changementa  Phondtiquea,  Paris  1890. 
Paul  P  =  H.   Paul,  Prinzipien  der  Sprachgeachichte,  4te  Aufl.,  Halle   1909. 

Gr  =  Grundriaa  der  germanischen  Philologie. 
PBB  =  Beitrage  zur  Geachichte  der  deutachen  Sprache  (Paul  u.  Braune). 
Pedersen  GKS  =  H.    Pedersen,    Vergl.    Grammatik  der  keltischen   Sprachen, 

GSttingen  1909. 
PhG  =  O.  Jespersen,  Phonetische  Grundfragen,  Leipzig  1904. 
Porzezinski    Spr  =  V.    Porzezinski,    Einleitung    in    die    Sprachwiaaenachaft, 

Leipzig  1910. 
Progr.  =  O.  Jespersen,  Progreaa  in  Language,  London  1894. 


ABBREVIATIONS    OF   BOOK    TITLES  15 

Rask  P  =  R.  Rask  [Prisskrift]    Undersogelse  om  det  gamie  Nordiske  Sprogs 
Oprindehe,  Copenhagen  181S. 
SA  =  Samlede  AJhandlinger,  Copenhagen  1834. 
Raumer    Gesch  =  R.    v.    Raumer,    Genchichte   der   germanischen   Philologte, 

Miinchen  1870. 
Ronjat  =  J.  Ronjat,  Le  Developpement  du  Langage  chez  un  Enjant  Bilingue, 

Paris  1913. 
Sandfeld  Jensen  S  =  Kr.    Sandfeld   Jensen,    Sprogvidenskaben,   Copenhagen 
1913. 
Sprw  =  Die  Sprachwiasenschaft,  Leipzig  1915. 
Saussure  LG  =  F.   de  Saussure,  Cours  de  Linguistique  G6n6rale,  Lausanne 

191G. 
Sayce  P  =  A.  H.  Sayce,  Principles  oj  Comparative  Philology,  2nd  ed.,  London 
1875. 
S  =  Introduction  to  the  Science  of  Language,  London  1880. 
Scherer  GDS  =  W.   Scherer,   Zur  Oeschichte  der  deutachen  Sprache,   Berlin 

1878. 
Schleicher  I,  II  =  A.  Schleicher,  Sprachvergleichende  Vntersuchungen,  I-II, 
Bonn  1848,   1850. 
Bed.  =  Die  Bedeutung  der  Sprache,  Weimar  1865. 
C  =  Compendium  der  vergl.  Grammatik,  4te  Aufl.,  Weimar  1876. 
D  =  Die  deutsche  Sprache,  Stuttgart  1S60. 
Darw.  =  Die    Darwinische    Theorie     und    die    Sprachunasenachaft, 

Weimar  1873. 
NV  =  Nomen  und  Verbum,  Leipzig  1865. 
Schuchardt  SID  =  H.    Schuchardt,   Slawo-DeiUschea    u.   Slawo-Italienischea, 
Graz  1885. 
KS  =  Kreolische  Studien  (Wien,  Akademie). 
Simonyi  US  =  S.  Simonyi,  Die  Ungarische  Sprache,  Strassburg  1907. 
Skt.  =  Sanskrit. 
Sommer  Lat.  =  F.   Sommer,  Handbuch  der  latein-   Laul-  wid  Formenlehre, 

Heidelberg  1902. 
Stern  =  Clara  and  William   Stern,   Die  Kinder  sprache,   Leipzig   1907. 
StoSel   Int.  =  C.   StoSel,   Intensives  and  Down-toners,   Heidelberg   1901. 
Streitberg  Gesch  =  W.    Streitberg,    Geschichte   der   indogerm.    Sprachwiasen- 
schaft, Strassburg  1917. 
Urg  =  Urgermanische  Grammatik,  Heidelberg  1896. 
Sturtevant  LCh  =  E.   H.   Sturtevant,  Linguistic  Change,  Chicago   1917. 
Siitterlin  WSG  =  L.  Siitterlin,  Das  Wesen  der  sprachlichen  Gebilde,  Heidel- 
berg 1902. 
WW  =  Werden  und  Wesen  der  Sprache,  Leipzig  1913. 
Sweet  CP  =  H.  Sweet,  Collected  Papers,  Oxford  1913. 
H  =  The  History  of  Language,  London  1900. 
PS  =  The  Practical  Study  of  Languages,  London  1899. 
Tegn^r  SM  =  E.  Tegner,  Spraketa  makt  ofver  tanken,  Stockholm  1880. 
Vemer  =  K.  Verner,  Afhandlinger  og  Breve,  Copenhagen  1903. 
Wechssler  L  =  E.  Wechssler,  Giebt  es  Lautgesetze  ?  Halle  1900. 
Whitney  G  =  W.  D.  Whitney,  Life  and  Growth  of  Language,  London  1875. 
L  =  Language  and  the  Study  of  Language,  London  1868. 
M  =  Max  Mailer  and  the  Science  of  Language,  New  York  1892. 
OLS  =  Oriental  and  Linguistic  Studies,  New  York   1873-4. 
Wundt  S  =  W.  Wundt,  Die  Sprache,  Leipzig  1900. 


PHONETIC    SYMBOLS 


[a']  as  in  olms. 

[ai]  as  in  tee. 

[au]  as  in  howse. 

[se]  as  in  hat. 

[ei]  as  in  hate. 

[e]  as  in  care  ;  Fr.  tel. 

[a]  indistinct  vowels. 

[i]   as  in  fill  ;  Fr.  qui. 

fi-]  as  in  feel ;  Fr.  fille. 

[o]  as  in  Fr.  aeau. 

[ou]  as  in  so, 

[d]  open  o-sounds. 

fu]  as  in  iuU  ;  Fr.  iou. 

[u'j  as  in  fool ;  Fr.  6poMsew 


standij  before  the  stressed  syllable, 
indicates  length  of  the  preceding  sound. 
[y]  as  in  Fr.  vu. 


[a]  as  in  cut. 
[«]  as  in  Fr.  fe«. 
[ce]  as  in  Fr.  sceur. 
["]  French  nasalization. 
[c]  as  in  G.  ich. 
[x]  as  in  G.,  Sc.  loch. 
[6]  as  in  this. 
[j]  as  in  2/ou. 
[]?]  as  in  thick. 
[/]  as  in  she. 
[5]  as  in  measure. 
[']  in  Russian  palatalization,  in 
Danish  glottal  stop. 


16 


BOOK  I 
HISTORY    OF    LINGUISTIC    SCIENCE 


17 


CHAPTER  I 
BEFORE    1800 

§  1.  Antiquity.     §  2.  Middle  Ages  and  Renaissance.     §  3.  Eighteenth- 
century  Speculation.     Herder.     §  4.  Jenisch. 

I. — §1.  Antiquity. 

The  science  of  language  began,  tentatively  and  approximately, 
when  the  minds  of  men  first  turned  to  problems  like  these  :  How 
is  it  that  people  do  not  speak  every^vhere  the  same  language  ? 
How  were  words  first  created  ?  What  is  the  relation  between  a 
name  and  the  thing  it  stands  for  ?  Why  is  such  and  such  a  person, 
or  such  and  such  a  thing,  called  tJiis  and  not  that  ?  The  first 
answers  to  these  questions,  like  primitive  answers  to  other  riddles 
of  the  universe,  were  largely  theological  :  God,  or  one  particular 
god,  had  created  language,  or  God  led  all  animals  to  the  first  man 
in  order  that  he  might  give  them  names.  Thus  in  the  Old  Testa- 
ment the  diversity  of  languages  is  explained  as  a  punishment 
from  God  for  man's  crimes  and  presumption.  These  were  great 
and  general  problems,  but  the  minds  of  the  early  Jews  were  also 
occupied  with  smaller  and  more  particular  problems  of  language, 
as  when  etymological  interpretations  were  given  of  such  personal 
names  as  were  not  immediately  self-explanatory. 

The  same  predilection  for  etymology,  and  a  similar  primitive 
kind  of  etymology,  based  entirely  on  a  more  or  less  accidental 
similarity  of  sound  and  easily  satisfied  with  any  fanciful  connexion 
in  sense,  is  found  abundantly  in  Greek  writers  and  in  their  Latin 
imitators.  But  to  the  speculative  minds  of  Greek  thinkers  the 
problem  that  proved  most  attractive  was  the  general  and  abstract 
one,  Are  words  natinral  and  necessary  expressions  of  the  notions 
underlying  them,  or  are  they  merely  arbitrary  and  conventional 
signs  for  notions  that  might  have  been  equally  well  expressed  by 
any  other  sounds  ?  Endless  discussions  were  carried  on  about 
this  question,  as  we  see  particularly  from  Plato's  Kratylos,  and 
no  very  definite  result  was  arrived  at,  nor  could  any  be  expected 
so  long  as  one  language  only  formed  the  basis  of  the  discussion — 
even  in  om*  own  days,  after  a  centm-y  of  comparative  philology, 
the  question  still  remains  an  open  one.  In  Greece,  the  two  catch- 
words phusei  (by  nature)  and  thesei  (by  convention)  for  centuries 

19 


\E   1800  [cii.  I 

divided  phuosopners  aiiJ  grammarians  into  two  camps,  while 
some,  like  Sokrates  in  Plato's  dialogue,  though  admitting  that 
in  language  as  actually  existing  there  was  no  natural  connexion 
between  word  and  thing,  still  wished  that  an  ideal  language  might 
be  created  in  which  words  and  things  would  be  tied  together  in 
a  perfectly  rational  wa}' — thus  paving  the  way  for  Bishop  Wilkins 
and  other  modern  constructors  of  philosophical  languages. 

Such  abstract  and  a  priori  speculations,  however  stimulating 
and  clever,  hardly  deserve  the  name  of  science,  as  this  term  is 
understood  nowadays.  Science  presupposes  careful  observation 
and  systematic  classification  of  facts,  and  of  that  in  the  old  Greek 
writers  on  language  we  find  very  little.  The  earliest  masters  in 
linguistic  observation  and  classification  were  the  old  Indian  gram- 
marians. The  language  of  the  old  sacred  hymns  had  become  in 
many  points  obsolete,  but  religion  required  that  not  one  iota  of 
these  revered  texts  should  be  altered,  and  a  scrupulous  oral  tradition 
kept  them  unchanged  from  generation  to  generation  in  every 
minute  particular.  This  led  to  a  wonderfully  exact  analysis  of 
speech  sounds,  in  wliich  every  detail  of  articulation  was  care- 
fully described,  and  to  a  no  less  admirable  analj'sis  of  grammatical 
forms,  which  were  arranged  systematically  and  described  in  a 
concise  and  highly  ingenious,  though  artificial,  terminology.  The 
whole  manner  of  treatment  was  entirely  different  from  the  methods 
of  Western  grammarians,  and  when  the  works  of  Panini  and  other 
Sanskrit  grammarians  were  first  made  kno'WTi  to  Europeans  in 
the  nineteenth  century,  they  profoundh^  influenced  our  own  lin- 
guistic science,  as  witnessed,  among  other  things,  by  the  fact  that 
some  of  the  Indian  technical  terms  are  still  extensively  used,  for 
instance  those  describing  various  kinds  of  compound  nouns. 

In  Europe  grammatical  science  was  slowly  and  laboriou?^Iy 
developed  in  Greece  and  later  in  Rome.  Aristotle  laid  the  founda- 
tion of  the  division  of  words  into  "  parts  of  speech  "  and  introduced 
the  notion  of  case  (ptosis).  His  work  in  this  connexion  was 
continued  by  the  Stoics,  many  of  whose  grammatical  distinctions 
and  terms  are  still  in  use,  the  latter  in  their  Latin  dress,  which 
embodies  some  curious  mistakes,  as  when  genike,  "  the  case  of  kmd 
or  species,"  was  rendered  genitivus,  as  if  it  meant  "the  case  of 
origin,"  or,  worse  still,  when  aitiatike,  "  the  case  of  object,"  was 
rendered  accusativus,  as  if  from  aitidoniai,  '  I  accuse.'  In  later 
times  the  philological  school  of  Alexandria  was  particularly 
important,  the  object  of  research  being  the  interpretation  of  tl'.e 
old  poets,  whose  language  was  no  longer  instantly  intelligible. 
Details  of  flexion  and  of  the  meaning  of  words  were  described 
and  referred  to  the  two  categories  of  analogy  or  regularity  and 
anomaly  or  irregularity,  but  real  insight  into  the  nature  of  language 


§1]  ANTIQUITY  21 

made  very  little  progress  either  with  the  Alexandrians  or  with 
their  Roman  inheritors,  and  etymology  still  remained  in  the 
childlike  stage. 


I. — §  3.  Middle  Ages  and  Renaissance. 

Nor  did  linguistic  science  advance  in  the  Sliddle  Ages.  The 
chief  thing  then  was  learning  Latin  as  the  common  language  of 
the  Church  and  of  what  little  there  was  of  civilization  generally ; 
but  Latin  was  not  studied  in  a  scientific  spirit,  and  the  various 
vernacular  languages,  which  one  by  one  blossomed  out  into 
languages  of  literatiure,  even  less  so. 

The  Renaissance  in  so  far  brought  about  a  change  in  this,  as 
it  widened  the  horizon,  especially  by  introducing  the  study  of 
Greek.  It  also  favoured  grammatical  studies  through  the  stress 
it  laid  on  correct  Latin  as  represented  in  the  best  period  of  classical 
literature  :  it  now  became  the  ambition  of  humanists  in  all 
countries  to  Avrite  Latin  Uke  Cicero.  In  the  following  centuries 
we  witness  a  constantly  deepening  interest  in  the  various  living 
languages  of  Eiurope,  owing  to  the  growing  importance  of  native 
hteratures  and  to  increasing  facilities  of  international  traffic  and 
communication  in  general.  The  most  important  factor  here  was, 
of  course,  the  invention  of  printing,  which  rendered  it  incom- 
parably more  easy  than  formerly  to  obtain  the  means  of  studjang 
foreign  languages.  It  should  be  noted  also  that  in  those  times 
the  prevalent  theological  interest  made  it  a  much  more  common 
thing  than  nowadays  for  ordinarj^  scholars  to  have  some  know- 
ledge of  Hebrew  as  the  original  language  of  the  Old  Testament. 
The  acquaintance  with  a  language  so  different  in  type  from  those 
spoken  in  Eiu-ope  in  many  ways  stimulated  the  interest  in  linguistic 
studies,  though  on  the  other  hand  it  proved  a  fruitful  source  of 
error,  because  the  position  of  the  Semitic  family  of  languages 
was  not  yet  understood,  and  because  Hebrew  was  thought  to  be 
the  language  spoken  in  Paradise,  and  therefore  imagined  to  be 
the  language  from  which  all  other  languages  were  descended. 
All  kinds  of  fanciful  similarities  between  Hebrew  and  European 
languages  were  taken  as  proofs  of  the  origin  of  the  latter  ;  every 
imaginable  permutation  of  sounds  (or  rather  of  letters)  was  looked 
upon  as  possible  so  long  as  there  was  a  slight  connexion  in  the 
sense  of  the  two  words  compared,  and  however  incredible  it  may 
seem  nowadays,  the  fact  that  Hebrew  was  written  from  right  to 
left,  while  we  in  our  writing  proceed  from  left  to  right,  was 
considered  justification  enough  for  the  most  violent  transposition 
of  letters  in  etymological  explanations.  And  yet  all  these  flighty 
and  whimsical  comparisons  served  perhaps  in  some  measm'e  to 


22  BEFORE   1800  [cH.  i 

pave  the  way  for  a  more  systematic  treatment  of  etymology  through 
collecting  vast  stores  of  words  from  which  sober  and  critical  minds 
might  select  those  instances  of  indubitable  connexion  on  which  a 
sound  science  of  etymology  could  eventually  be  constructed. 

The  discovery  and  publication  of  texts  in  the  old  Gothonic 
(Germanic)  languages,  especially  Wulfila's  Gotliic  translation  of 
the  Bible,  compared  with  which  Old  English  (Anglo-Saxon),  Old 
German  and  Old  Icelandic  texts  were  of  less,  though  by  no  means 
of  despicable,  account,  paved  the  way  for  historical  treatment 
of  this  important  group  of  languages  in  the  seventeenth  and 
eighteenth  centuries.  But  on  the  whole,  the  interest  in  the  history 
of  languages  in  those  days  was  small,  and  linguistic  thinkers  thought 
it  more  urgent  to  establish  vast  treasuries  of  languages  as  actually 
spoken  than  to  follow  the  development  of  any  one  language  from 
century  to  century.  Thus  we  see  that  the  great  philosopher 
Leibniz,  who  took  much  interest  in  hnguistic  pursuits  and  to  whom 
we  owe  many  judicious  utterances  on  the  possibility  of  a  universal 
language,  instigated  Peter  the  Great  to  have  vocabularies  and 
specimens  collected  of  all  the  various  languages  of  his  vast  empire. 
To  this  initiative  taken  by  Leibniz,  and  to  the  great  personal 
interest  that  the  Empress  Catherine  II  took  in  these  studies,  we 
owe,  directly  or  indirectly,  the  great  repertories  of  all  languages 
then  known,  first  Pallas's  lAngiLarum  totius  orbis  vocabtdaria 
comparativa  (1786-87),  then  Hervas's  Catdlogo  de  las  lengnaa 
de  las  Tuiziones  conocidas  (1800-5),  and  finally  Adelung's 
Mithridates  oder  allgemeine  Sprachenkunde  (1806-17).  In  spite 
of  their  inevitable  shortcomings,  their  uncritical  and  unequal 
treatment  of  many  languages,  the  preponderance  of  lexical  over 
grammatical  information,  and  the  use  of  biblical  texts  as  their 
sole  connected  illustrations,  these  great  works  exercised  a  mighty 
influence  on  the  linguistic  thought  and  research  of  the  time,  and 
contributed  very  much  to  the  birth  of  the  hnguistic  science  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  It  should  not  be  forgotten,  moreover,  that 
Hervas  was  one  of  the  first  to  recognize  the  superior  importance 
of  grammar  to  vocabulary  for  deciding  questions  of  relationship 
between  languages. 

It  will  be  well  here  to  consider  the  manner  in  which  languages 
and  the  teaching  of  languages  were  generally  viewed  during  the 
centuries  preceding  the  rise  of  Comparative  Linguistics.  The  chief 
language  taught  was  Latin  ;  the  first  and  in  many  cases  the  only 
grammar  with  which  scholars  came  into  contact  was  Latin  grammar. 
No  wonder  therefore  that  grammar  and  Latin  grammar  came 
in  the  minds  of  most  people  to  be  sjmonyms.  Latin  grammar 
played  an  enormous  rfile  in  the  schools,  to  the  exclusion  of  maay 
subjects  (the  pupil's  own  native  language,  science,  history,  etc.) 


§2]  MIDDLE    AGES    AND    RENAISSANCE  28 

which  we  are  now  beginning  to  think  more  essential  for  the  educa- 
tion of  the  young.  The  traditional  term  for  '  secondary  school  ' 
was  in  England  '  grammar  school  '  and  in  Denmark  '  latinskole,' 
and  the  reason  for  both  expressions  was  obviously  the  same. 
Here,  however,  we  are  concerned  with  this  privileged  position  of 
Latin  grammar  only  in  so  far  as  it  influenced  the  treatment  of 
languages  in  general.     It  did  so  in  more  ways  than  one. 

Latin  was  a  language  with  a  wealth  of  flexional  forms,  and 
in  describing  other  languages  the  same  categories  as  were  found 
in  Latin  were  applied  as  a  matter  of  course,  even  where  there  was 
nothing  in  these  other  languages  which  really  corresponded  to  what 
was  found  in  Latin.  In  English  and  Danish  grammars  paradigms 
of  noun  declension  were  given  with  such  cases  as  accusative,  dative 
and  ablative,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  no  separate  forms  for  these 
cases  had  existed  for  centuries.  All  languages  were  indiscriminately 
saddled  with  the  elaborate  Latin  system  of  tenses  and  moods  in 
the  verbs,  and  by  means  of  such  Procrustean  methods  the  actual 
facts  of  many  languages  were  distorted  and  misrepresented. 
Discriminations  which  had  no  foundation  in  reality  were  never- 
theless insisted  on,  while  discriminations  which  happened  to  be 
non-existent  in  Latin  were  apt  to  be  overlooked.  The  mischief 
consequent  on  this  unfortunate  method  of  measuring  all  grammar 
after  the  pattern  of  Latin  grammar  has  not  even  yet  completely 
disappeared,  and  it  is  even  now  difficult  to  find  a  single  grammar 
of  any  language  that  is  not  here  and  there  influenced  by  the 
Latin  bias. 

Latin  was  chiefly  taught  as  a  written  language  (witness  the 
totally  different  manner  in  which  Latin  was  pronounced  in 
the  different  countries,  the  consequence  being  that  as  early  as  the 
sixteenth  century  French  and  English  scholars  were  imable  to 
understand  each  other's  spoken  Latin).  This  led  to  the  almost 
exclusive  occupation  with  letters  instead  of  sounds.  The  fact 
that  all  language  is  primarily  spoken  and  only  secondarily  veritten 
do"«Ti,  that  the  real  life  of  language  is  in  the  mouth  and  ear  and 
not  in  the  pen  and  eye,  was  overlooked,  to  the  detriment  of  a  real 
understanding  of  the  essence  of  language  and  linguistic  develop- 
ment ;  and  very  often  where  the  spoken  form  of  a  language  was 
accessible  scholars  contented  themselves  with  a  reading  knowledge. 
In  spite  of  many  efforts,  some  of  which  go  back  to  the  sixteenth 
century,  but  which  did  not  become  really  powerful  till  the  rise 
of  modern  phonetics  in  the  nineteenth  century,  the  fundamental 
significance  of  spoken  as  opposed  to  \vritten  language  has  not 
yet  been  fully  appreciated  by  all  linguists.  There  are  still  too 
many  writers  on  philological  questions  who  have  evidently  never 
tried  to  think  in  sounds  instead  of  thinking  in  letters  and  symbols, 


24  BEFORE   1800  [cu.  i 

and  who  would  probably  be  sorely  puzzled  if  they  were  to  pro- 
nounce all  the  forms  that  come  so  glibly  to  their  pens.  What 
Sweet  -wTote  in  1877  in  the  preface  to  his  Handbook  of  Phonetics 
is  perhaps  less  true  now  than  it  was  then,  but  it  still  contains  some 
elements  of  truth.  "  Manj'  instances,"  he  said,  "might  be  quoted 
of  the  way  in  which  important  philological  facts  and  laws  have 
been  passed  over  or  misrepresented  through  the  observer's  want 
of  phonetic  training.  Schleicher's  failing  to  observe  the  Lithua- 
nian accents,  or  even  to  comprehend  them  when  pointed  out  by 
Kurschat,  is  a  striking  instance."  But  there  can  be  no  doubt 
that  the  way  in  which  Latin  has  been  for  centuries  made  the 
basis  of  all  linguistic  instruction  is  largely  responsible  for  the 
preponderance  of  eye-philology  to  ear-philology  in  the  history  of 
our  science. 

We  next  come  to  a  point  which  to  my  mind  is  very  important, 
because  it  concerns  something  which  has  had,  and  has  justly  had, 
enduring  effects  on  the  manner  in  which  language,  and  especially 
grammar,  is  viewed  and  taught  to  this  day.  What  was  the  object 
of  teaching  Latin  in  the  Middle  Ages  and  later  ?  Certainly  not 
the  purely  scientific  one  of  imparting  knowledge  for  knowledge's 
own  sake,  apart  from  anj'  practical  use  or  advantage,  simply  in 
order  to  widen  the  spiritual  horizon  and  to  obtain  the  joy  of  pure 
intellectual  understanding.  For  such  a  purpose  some  people  "v^ith 
scientific  leanings  may  here  and  there  take  up  the  study  of  some 
out-of-the-way  African  or  American  idiom.  But  the  reasons  for 
teaching  and  learning  Latin  were  not  so  idealistic.  Latin  w'as 
not  even  taught  and  learnt  solely  with  the  purpose  of  opening  the 
doors  to  the  old  classical  or  to  the  more  recent  religious  literature 
in  that  language,  but  chiefly,  and  in  the  first  instance,  because 
Latin  was  a  practical  and  highly  important  means  of  communication 
between  educated  people.  One  had  to  learn  not  only  to  road 
Latin,  but  also  to  ^vl■ite  Latin,  if  one  wanted  to  maintain  no  matter 
how  humble  a  position  in  the  republic  of  learning  or  in  the  hier- 
archy of  the  Church.  Consequently,  grammar  was  not  (even 
primarily)  the  science  of  how  words  were  inflected  and  how  forms 
were  used  bj''  the  old  Romans,  but  chiefly  and  essentially  the 
art  of  inflecting  words  and  of  using  the  forms  yourself,  if  you 
wanted  to  write  correct  Latin.  This  yoii  must  say,  and  these 
faults  you  must  avoid — such  were  the  lessons  imparted  in  the 
schools.  Grammar  was  not  a  set  of  facts  observed  but  of  rules  to 
be  observed,  and  of  paradigms,  i.e.  of  patterns,  to  be  follo-wcd. 
Sometimes  this  character  of  grammaticaLrhistruction  is  expres-sly 
indicated  in  the  form  of  the  precepts  given,  as  in  such  memorial 
verses  as  this  :  "  Tolle  -me,  -mi,  -mil,  -mis.  Si  declinare  domvs  vis  !  " 
In  other  words,  grammar  was  prescriptive  rather  than  descriptive. 


§2]  MIDDLE    AGES    AND    RENAISSANCE  25 

The  current  definition  of  grammar,  therefore,  was  "  ars  bene 
dicendi  et  bene  scribendi,"  "  I'art  de  bicn  dire  et  de  bicn  ecrire," 
the  art  of  speaking  and  wi'iting  correctly.  J.  C.  ScaHger  said, 
"  Grammatici  unus  finis  est  recte  loqui."  To  attain  to  correct 
diction  ('  good  grammar  ')  and  to  avoid  faulty  diction  ('  bad 
grammar  '),  such  were  the  two  objects  of  grammatical  teaching. 
Now,  the  same  point  of  view,  in  which  the  two  elements  of  '  art  ' 
and  of  '  correctness '  entered  so  largely,  was  applied  not  only  to 
Latin,  but  to  other  languages  as  well,  when  the  various  vernaculars 
came  to  be  treated  grammatically. 

The  vocabulary,  too,  was  treated  from  the  same  point  of  view. 
This  is  especially  evident  in  the  case  of  the  dictionaries  issued  by 
the  French  and  Italian  Academies.  They  differ  from  dictionaries 
as  now  usually  compiled  in  being  not  collections  of  all  and  any 
words  their  authors  could  get  hold  of  within  the  limits  of  the 
language  concerned,  but  in  being  selections  of  words  deserving  the 
recommendations  of  the  best  arbiters  of  taste  and  therefore  fit 
to  be  used  in  the  highest  literature  by  even  the  most  elegant  or 
fastidious  -svriters.  Dictionaries  thus  understood  were  less  descrip- 
tions of  actual  usage  than  prescriptions  for  the  best  usage  of 
words. 

The  normative  way  of  viewing  language  is  fraught  with  some 
great  dangers  which  can  only  be  avoided  through  a  comprehen- 
sive knowledge  of  the  historic  development  of  languages  and  of 
the  general  conditions  of  linguistic  psychology.  Otherwise,  the 
tendency  everywhere  is  to  draw  too  narrow  limits  for  what  is 
allowable  or  correct.  In  many  cases  one  form,  or  one  construc- 
tion, only  is  recognized,  even  where  two  or  more  are  found  in 
actual  speech  ;  the  question  which  is  to  be  selected  as  the  only  good 
form  comes  to  be  decided  too  often  by  individual  fancy  or  predilec- 
tion, where  no  scientific  tests  can  yet  be  applied,  and  thus  a  form 
may  often  be  proscribed  which  from  a  less  narrow  point  of  view 
might  have  appeared  just  as  good  as,  or  even  better  than,  the 
one  preferred  in  the  official  grammar  or  dictionary.  In  other 
instances,  where  two  forms  were  recognized,  the  grammarian 
wanted  to  give  rules  for  their  discrimination,  and  sometimes  on 
the  basis  of  a  totally  inadequate  induction  he  would  establish 
nice  distinctions  not  really  warranted  by  actual  usage — distinctions 
which  subsequent  generations  had  to  learn  at  school  with  the  sweat 
of  their  brows  and  which  were  often  considered  most  important 
in  spite  of  their  intrinsic  insignificance.  Such  unreal  or  half-real 
subtle  distinctions  are  the  besetting  sin  of  French  grammarians 
from  the  '  grand  siecle  '  onwards,  while  they  have  played  a  much 
less  considerable  part  in  England,  where  people  have  been  on  the 
whole  more  inclined  to  let  things  slide  as  best  they  may  on  the 


26  BEFORE   1800  [ch.  i 

'  laissez  faire '  principle,  and  where  no  Academy  was  ever  estab- 
lished to  regulate  language.  But  even  in  EngUsh  rules  are  not 
unfrequently  given  in  schools  and  in  newspaper  offices  which  are 
based  on  narrow  views  and  hasty  generalizations.  Because  a 
preposition  at  the  end  of  a  sentence  may  in  some  instances  be 
clumsy  or  unwieldy,  this  is  no  reason  why  a  final  preposition  should 
always  and  under  all  circumstances  be  considered  a  grave  error. 
But  it  is  of  course  easier  for  the  schoolmaster  to  give  an  absolute, 
and  inviolable  rule  once  and  for  all  than  to  study  carefulh'  all 
the  various  considerations  that  might  render  a  qualification 
desirable.  If  the  ordinary  books  on  Common  Faults  in  Writing 
and  Speaking  English  and  similar  works  in  other  languages  have 
not  even  now  assimilated  the  teachings  of  Comparative  and 
Historic  Linguistics,  it  is  no  wonder  that  the  grammarians  of  the 
seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries,  with  whom  we  are  here 
concerned,  should  be  in  many  ways  guided  by  narrow  and 
insufficient  views  on  what  ought  to  determine  correctness  of  spccclh 
Here  also  the  importance  given  to  the  study  of  Latin  was 
sometimes  harmful  ;  too  much  was  settled  by  a  reference  to  Latin 
rules,  even  where  the  modern  languages  really  followed  rules  of 
their  own  that  were  opposed  to  those  of  Latin.  The  learning  qf 
Latin  grammar  was  supposed  to  be,  and  to  some  extent  really 
was,  a  schooling  in  logic,  as  the  strict  observance  of  the  rules  of 
any  foreign  language  is  bound  to  be  ;  but  the  consequence  of  this 
was  that  when  questions  of  grammatical  correctness  were  to  be 
settled,  too  much  importance  was  often  given  to  purely  logical 
considerations,  and  scholars  were  sometimes  apt  to  determine 
what  was  to  be  called  '  logical ''  in  language  according  to  whetlier 
it  was  or  was  not  in  conformity  with  Latin  usage.  This  disposition, 
joined  with  the  unavoidable  conservatism  of  mankind,  and  more 
particularly  of  teachers,  would  in  many  ways  prove  a  hindrance 
to  natural  developments  in  a  living  speech.  But  we  must  again 
take  up  the  thread  of  the  history  of  linguistic  theory. 

I. — §3.  Eighteenth-century  Speculation.    Herder. 

The  problem  of  a  natural  origin  of  language  exercised  sonu  of 
the  best-known  thinkers  of  the  eighteenth  century.  Rousfeau 
imagined  the  first  men  setting  themselves  more  or  less  deliberately 
to  frame  a  language  by  an  agreement  similar  to  (or  forming  part 
of)  the  corilrat  social  which  according  to  him  was  the  basis  of  all 
social  order.  There  is  here  the  obvious  difficulty  of  imagining 
how  primitive  men  who  had  been  previously  without  any  speech 
came  to  feel  the  want  of  language,  and  how  they  could  agree  on 
what  sound  was  to  represent   what  idea  without  having  already 


§8]       EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY   SPECULATION        27 

some  means  of  communication.  Rousseau's  whole  manner  of 
putting  and  of  viewing  the  problem  is  evidently  too  crude  to  be 
of  any  real  importance  in  the  history  of  linguistic  science. 

Condillac  is  much  more  sensible  when  he  tries  to  imagine  how 
a  speechless  man  and  a  speechless  woman  might  be  led  quite 
natiu-ally  to  acquire  something  like  language,  starting  with  instinc- 
tive cries  and  violent  gestures  called  forth  by  strong  emotions. 
Such  cries  would  come  to  be  associated  with  elementary  feelings, 
and  new  sounds  might  come  to  indicate  various  objects  if  produced 
repeatedly  in  connexion  with  gestures  showing  what  objects  the 
speaker  wanted  to  call  attention  to.  If  these  two  first  speaking 
beings  had  as  yet  very  little  power  to  vary  their  sounds,  their 
child  would  have  a  more  flexible  tongue,  and  would  therefore  be 
able  to,  and  be  impelled  to,  produce  some  new  sounds,  the  meaning 
of  which  his  parents  would  guess  at,  and  which  they  in  their  turn 
would  imitate  ;  thus  gradually  a  greater  and  greater  number  of 
words  would  come  into  existence,  generation  after  generation 
working  painfully  to  enrich  and  develop  what  had  been  already 
acquired,  until  it  finally  became  a  real  language. 

The  profoundest  thinker  on  these  problems  in  the  eighteenth 
century  was  Johann  Gottfried  Herder,  who,  though  he  did  little 
or  nothing  in  the  way  of  scientific  research,  yet  prepared  the  rise 
of  linguistic  science.  In  his  prize  essay  on  the  Origin  of  Language 
(1772)  Herder  first  vigorously  and  successfully  attacks  the  orthodox 
view  of  his  age — a  view  which  had  been  recently  upheld  very 
emphatically  by  one  Siissmilch — that  language  could  not  have 
been  invented  by  man,  but  was  a  direct  gift  from  God.  One  of 
Herder's  strongest  arguments  is  that  if  language  had  been  framed 
by  God  and  by  Him  instilled  into  the  mind  of  man,  we  should 
expect  it  to  be  much  more  logical,  much  more  imbued  with  pure 
reason  than  it  is  as  an  actual  matter  of  fact.  Much  in  all  existing 
languages  is  so  chaotic  and  ill-arranged  that  it  could  not  be  God's 
work,  but  must  come  from  the  hand  of  man.  On  the  other  hand, 
Herder  does  not  think  that  language  was  really  '  invented  '  by 
man — although  this  was  the  word  used  by  the  Berlin  Academy 
when  opening  the  competition  in  which  Herder's  essay  gained  the 
prize.  Language  was  not  deliberately  framed  by  man,  but  sprang 
of  necessity  from  his  innermost  nature  ;  the  genesis  of  language 
according  to  him  is  due  to  an  impulse  similar  to  that  oi  tne  mature 
embryo  pressing  to  be  born.  Man,  in  the  same  way  as  all  animals, 
gives  vent  to  his  feelings  in  tones,  but  this  is  not  enough  ;  it  is 
impossible  to  trace  the  origin  of  human  language  to  these  emotional 
cries  alone.  However  much  they  may  be  refined  and  fixed,  without 
understanding  they  can  never  become  human,  conscious  language. 
Man  differs  from  brute  animals  not  in  degree  or  in  the  addition  of 


28  BEFORE   1800  [ch.  i 

new  powers,  but  in  a  totally  different  direction  and  development 
of  all  powers.  Man's  inferiority  to  animals  in  strength  and  sureness 
of  instinct  is  compensated  by  his  wider  sphere  of  attention  ;  the 
whole  disposition  of  his  mind  as  an  unanalysable  entity  constitutes 
the  impassable  barrier  between  him  and  the  lower  animals.  Man, 
then,  shows  conscious  reflexion  when  among  the  ocean  of  sensa- 
tions that  rush  into  his  soul  through  all  the  senses  he  singles  out 
one  wave  and  arrests  it,  as  when,  seeing  a  lamb,  he  looks  for  a  dis- 
tinguishing mark  and  finds  it  in  the  bleating,  so  that  next  time 
when  he  recognizes  the  same  animal  he  imitates  the  sound  of 
bleating,  and  thereby  creates  a  name  for  that  animal.  Thus  the 
lamb  to  him  is  '  the  bleater,'  and  nouns  are  created  from  verbs, 
whereas,  according  to  Herder,  if  language  had  been  the  creation 
of  God  it  would  inversely  have  begun  with  nouns,  as  that  would 
have  been  the  logically  ideal  order  of  procediue.  Another  charac- 
teristic trait  of  primitive  languages  is  the  crossing  of  various 
shades  of  feeling  and  the  necessity  of  expressing  thoughts  through 
strong,  bold  metaphors,  presenting  the  most  motley  picture. 
"  The  genetic  cause  lies  in  the  poverty  of  the  human  mind  and 
in  the  flowing  together  of  the  emotions  of  a  primitive  human 
being."  Another  consequence  is  the  wealth  of  synonyms  in 
primitive  language ;  "  alongside  of  real  poverty  it  has  the  most 
unnecessary  superfluity." 

When  Herder  here  speaks  of  primitive  or  '  original  '  languages, 
he  is  thinking  of  Oriental  languages,  and  especially  of  Hebrew. 
"  We  should  never  forget,"  says  Edward  Sapir,^  "  that  Herder's 
time-perspective  was  necessarily  very  diflPerent  from  ours.  Wliile 
we  unconcernedly  take  tens  or  even  himdreds  of  thousands  of 
years  in  wliich  to  allow  the  products  of  human  civilization  to 
develop.  Herder  was  still  compelled  to  operate  with  the  less  than 
six  thousand  years  that  orthodoxy  stingily  doled  out.  To  us  the 
two  or  three  thousand  years  that  separate  our  language  from  the 
Old  Testament  Hebrew  seems  a  negligible  quantity,  when  specu- 
lating on  the  origin  of  language  in  general  ;  to  Herder,  however, 
the  Hebrew  and  the  Greek  of  Homer  seemed  to  be  appreciably 
nearer  the  oldest  conditions  than  our  vernaculars — hence  his 
exaggeration  of  their  ursprilnglichkeit." 

Herder's  chief  influence  on  the  science  of  speech,  to  mj'  mind, 
is  not  derived  directly  from  the  ideas  contained  in  his  essay  on 
the  actual  origin  of  speech,  but  rather  indirectly  tluough  the 
whole  of  his  life's  work.  He  had  a  very  strong  sense  of  the  \alue 
of  everything  that  had  grown  naturally  (das  naturwiichsige)  ;  ho 
prepared  the  minds  of  his  comitrymen  for  the  manysided  reeep- 

*  See  his  essay  on  Herder's  "  Ursprung  der  spracho  "  in  Modern  Philology, 
5.   117  (1907). 


§3]         EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY   SPECULATION      29 

tiveness  of  the  Romanticists,  who  translated  and  admired  the 
popular  poetry  of  a  great  many  countries,  which  had  hitherto  been 
terrce  incognitce  ;  and  he  was  one  of  the  first  to  draw  attention  to 
the  great  national  value  of  his  own  country's  medieval  literature 
and  its  folklore,  and  thus  was  one  of  the  spiritual  ancestors  of 
Grimm.  He  sees  the  close  connexion  that  exists  between  language 
and  primitive  poetry,  or  that  kind  of  spontaneous  singing  that 
characterizes  the  childhood  or  youth  of  mankind,  and  which  is 
totallj^  distinct  from  the  artificial  poetry  of  later  ages.  But  to" 
him  each  language  is  not  only  the  instrument  of  literature,  but 
itself  literature  and  poetr3\  A  nation  speaks  its  soul  in  the  words 
it  uses.  Herder  admires  his  own  mother -tongue,  which  to  him 
is  perhaps  inferior  to  Greek,  but  superior  to  its  neighbours.  The 
combinations  of  consonants  give  it  a  certain  measured  pace  ;  it 
does  not  rush  forward,  but  walks  with  the  firm  carriage  of  a 
German.  The  nice  gradation  of  vowels  mitigates  the  force  of 
the  consonants,  and  the  numerous  spirants  make  the  German 
speech  pleasant  and  endearing.  Its  syllables  are  rich  and  firm, 
its  phrases  are  stately,  and  its  idiomatic  expressions  are  emphatic 
and  serious.  Still  in  some  ways  the  present  German  language  is 
degenerate  if  compared  with  that  of  Luther,  and  still  more  with 
that  of  the  Suabian  Emperors,  and  much  therefore  remains  to  be 
done  in  the  way  of  disinterring  and  revivifying  the  powerful 
expressions  now  lost.  Through  ideas  like  these  Herder  not  only 
exercised  a  strong  influence  on  Goethe  and  the  Romanticists, 
but  also  gave  impulses  to  the  linguistic  studies  of  the  following 
generation,  and  caused  many  younger  men  to  turn  from  the 
well-worn  classics  to  fields  of  research  previously  neglected. 

I. — §4.  Jenisch. 

Where  questions  of  correct  language  or  of  the  best  usage  are 
dealt  with,  or  where  different  languages  are  compared  with  regard 
to  their  eJBficiency  or  beauty,  as  is  done  very  often,  though  more 
often  in  dilettante  conversation  or  in  casual  remarks  in  literary 
works  than  in  scientific  linguistic  disquisitions,  it  is  no  far  cry  to 
the  question,  What  would  an  ideal  language  be  like  ?  But  such 
is  the  matter-of-factness  of  modern  scientific  thought,  that  probably 
no  scientific  Academy  in  our  own  days  would  think  of  doing  what 
the  Berlin  Academy  did  in  1794  when  it  offered  a  prize  for  the 
best  essay  on  the  ideal  of  a  perfect  language  and  a  comparison  of 
the  best-known  languages  of  Europe  as  tested  by  the  standard 
of  such  an  ideal.  A  Berlin  pastor,  D.  Jenisch,  won  the  prize,  and 
in  1796  brought  out  his  book  under  the  title  Philosophisch-kritische 
vergleichung  und  niirdigicng  von  vierzehn  dltern  und  neuern  S'prachen 


80  BEFORE   1800  [ch.  i 

Europens — a  book  which  is  even  now  well  worth  reading,  the 
more  so  because  its  subject  has  been  all  but  completely  neglected 
in  the  hundred  and  twenty  years  that  have  since  intervened.  In 
the  Introduction  the  author  has  the  following  passage,  which 
might  be  taken  as  the  motto  of  Wilhelm  v.  Humboldt,  Steinthal, 
Finck  and  Byrne,  who  do  not,  however,  seem  to  have  been 
inspired  by  Jenisch  :  "In  language  the  whole  intellectual  and 
moral  essence  of  a  man  is  to  some  extent  revealed.  '  Speak,  and 
you  are  '  is  rightly  said  by  the  Oriental.  The  language  of  the 
natural  man  is  savage  and  rude,  that  of  the  cultured  man  is  elegant 
and  polished.  As  the  Greek  was  subtle  in  thought  and  sensuously 
refined  in  feeling — as  the  Roman  was  serious  and  practical  rather 
than  speculative — as  the  Frenchman  is  popular  and  sociable — 
as  the  Briton  is  profound  and  the  German  philosophic — so  are 
also  the  languages  of  each  of  these  nations." 

Jenisch  then  goes  on  to  say  that  language  as  the  organ  for 
communicating  our  ideas  and  feelings  accomplishes  its  end  if  it 
represents  idea  and  feeling  according  to  the  actual  want  or  need 
of  the  mind  at  the  given  moment.  We  have  to  examine  in  each 
case  the  following  essential  qualities  of  the  languages  compared, 
(1)  richness,  (2)  energy  or  emphasis,  (3)  clearness,  and  (4)  euphony. 
Under  the  head  of  richness  we  are  concerned  not  only  with  the 
number  of  words,  first  for  material  objects,  then  for  spiritual  and 
abstract  notions,  but  also  with  the  ease  with  which  new  words 
can  be  formed  (lexikalische  bildsamkeit).  The  energy  of  a  language 
is  shown  in  its  lexicon  and  in  its  grammar  (simplicity  of  grammatical 
structure,  absence  of  articles,  etc.),  but  also  in  "  the  characteristic 
energy  of  the  nation  and  its  original  writers."  Clearness  and 
definiteness  in  the  same  way  are  shown  in  vocabulary  and  grammar, 
especially  in  a  regular  and  natural  sjmtax.  Euphony,  finally, 
depends  not  only  on  the  selection  of  consonants  and  \'owels 
utilized  in  the  language,  but  on  their  harmonious  combination,  the 
general  impression  of  the  language  being  more  important  than  any 
details  capable  of  being  analysed. 

These,  then,  are  the  criteria  by  which  Greek  and  Latin  and  a 
number  of  living  languages  are  compared  and  judged.  The  author 
displays  great  learning  and  a  sound  practical  knowledge  of  many 
languages,  and  his  remarks  on  the  advantages  and  shortcomings 
of  these  are  on  the  whole  judicious,  though  often  perhaps  too  much 
stress  is  laid  on  the  literary  merits  of  great  WTiters,  which  have 
really  no  intrinsic  connexion  with  the  value  of  a  language  as  such. 
It  depends  to  a  great  extent  on  accidental  circumstances  whether 
a  language  has  been  or  has  not  been  used  in  elevated  literature, 
and  its  merits  should  be  estimated,  so  far  as  this  is  possible,  inde- 
pendently of  the  perfection  of  its  literature.    Jenisch's  prejudice 


§  4]  JENISCH  81 

in  that  respect  is  shown,  for  instance,  when  he  says  (p.  36)  that 
the  endeavours  of  Hickes  are  entirely  futile,  when  he  tries  to  make 
out  regular  declensions  and  conjugations  in  the  barbarous  language 
of  Wdlfila's  translation  of  the  Bible.  But  otherwise  Jenisch  is 
singularly  free  from  prejudices,  as  shown  by  a  great  number  of 
passages  in  which  other  languages  are  praised  at  the  expense  of 
his  own.  Thus,  on  p.  396,  he  declares  German  to  be  the  most 
repellent  contrast  to  that  most  supple  modern  language,  French, 
on  account  of  its  unnatural  word-order,  its  eternally  trailing 
article,  its  want  of  participial  constructions,  and  its  interminable 
auxiliaries  (as  in  '  ich  werde  geliebt  werden,  ich  wurde  geliebt 
worden  sein,'  etc.),  wdth  the  frequent  separation  of  these  auxiliaries 
from  the  main  verb  through  extraneous  intermediate  words,  all 
of  wliich  gives  to  German  something  incredibly  awkward,  which 
to  the  reader  appears  as  lengthy  and  diffuse  and  to  the  writer  as 
inconvenient  and  intractable.  It  is  not  often  that  we  find  an 
author  appraising  his  own  language  with  such  severe  impartiality, 
and  I  have  given  the  passage  also  to  show  what  kind  of  problems 
confront  the  man  who  wishes  to  compare  the  relative  value  of 
languages  as  wholes.  Jenisch's  view  here  forms  a  striking  contrast 
to  Herder's  appreciation  of  their  common  mother -tongue. 

Jenisch's  book  does  not  seem  to  have  been  widely  read  by 
nineteenth-century  scholars,  who  took  up  totally  different  problems. 
Those  few  who  read  it  were  perhaps  inclined  to  say  with  S.  Lefmann 
(see  his  book  on  Franz  Bopp,  Nachtrag,  1897,  p,  xi)  that  it  is  diffi- 
cult to  decide  which  was  the  greater  fool,  the  one  who  put  this 
problem  or  the  one  who  tried  to  answer  it.  This  attitude,  however, 
towards  problems  of  valuation  in  the  matter  of  languages  is 
neither  just  nor  wise,  though  it  is  perhaps  easy  to  see  how  students 
of  comparative  grammar  were  by  the  very  nature  of  their  study 
led  to  look  down  upon  those  who  compared  languages  from  the 
point  of  view  of  aesthetic  or  literary  merits.  Anyhow,  it  seems  to 
me  no  small  merit  to  have  been  the  first  to  treat  such  problems 
as  these,  which  are  generally  answered  in  an  off-hand  way 
according  to  a  loose  general  judgement,  so  as  to  put  them  on  a 
scientific  footing  by  examining  in  detail  what  it  is  that  makes  us 
more  or  less  instinctively  prefer  one  language,  or  one  turn  or  expres- 
sion in  a  language,  and  thus  lay  the  foundation  of  that  inductive 
sBsthetic  theory  of  language  which  has  still  to  be  developed  in  a 
truly  scientific  spirit. 


CHAPTER  II 
BEGINNING    OF    NINETEENTH    CENTURY 

§  1.  Introduction.  Sanskrit.  §  2.  Friedricli  von  Schlegel.  §  3.  Rasmua 
Rask.  §  4.  Jacob  Grimm.  §  5.  The  Sound  Shift.  §  6.  Franz  Bopp. 
§  7.  Bopp  continued.  §  8.  Wilhelm  von  Humboldt.  §  9.  Grimm 
once  more. 

II.--§1.  Introduction.    Sanskrit. 

The  nineteenth  century  witnessed  an  enormous  growth  and 
development  of  the  science  of  language,  which  in  some  respects 
came  to  present  features  totally  unknown  to  previous  centuries. 
The  horizon  was  widened  ;  more  and  more  languages  were  described, 
studied  and  examined,  many  of  them  for  their  own  sake,  as  they 
had  no  important  literature.  Everj^where  a  deeper  insight  was 
gained  into  the  structures  even  of  such  languages  as  had  been 
for  centuries  objects  of  study ;  a  more  comprehensive  and  more 
incisive  classification  of  languages  was  obtained  with  a  deeper 
understanding  of  their  mutual  relationships,  and  at  the  same  time 
linguistic  forms  were  not  only  described  and  analysed,  but  also 
explained,  their  genesis  being  traced  as  far  back  as  historical 
evidence  allowed,  if  not  sometimes  further.  Instead  of  contenting 
itself  with  stating  when  and  where  a  form  existed  and  how  it  looked 
and  was  employed,  linguistic  science  now  also  began  to  ask  why 
it  had  taken  that  definite  shape,  and  thus  passed  from  a  purely 
descriptive  to  an  explanatory  science. 

The  chief  innovation  of  the  begimiing  of  the  nineteenth  century 
was  the  historical  point  of  view.  On  the  whole,  it  must  be  said 
that  it  was  reserved  for  that  century  to  apply  the  notion  of  history 
to  other  things  than  wars  and  the  vicissitudes  of  dj'^nasties.  and 
thus  to  discover  the  idea  of  development  or  evolution  as  pervading 
the  whole  universe.  This  brought  about  a  vast  change  in  the 
science  of  language,  as  in  other  sciences.  Instead  of  looking  ai  such 
a  language  as  Latin  as  one  fixed  point,  atid  instead  of  aiming  at 
fixing  another  language,  such  as  French,  in  one  classical  form, 
the  new  science  viewed  both  as  being  in  constant  flux,  as  growing, 
as  moving,  as  continually  changing.    It  cried  aloud  like  Hernclitus 

33 


§1]  INTRODUCTION.     SANSKRIT  83 

"  Panta  rei,"  and  like  Galileo  "  Eppur  si  muove."  And  lo  !  the 
better  this  historical  point  of  view  was  applied,  the  more  secrets 
languages  seemed  to  unveil,  and  the  more  light  seemed  also  to  be 
thrown  on  objects  outside  the  proper  sphere  of  language,  such  as 
ethnology  and  the  early  history  of  mankind  at  large  and  of 
particular  coimtries. 

It  is  often  said  that  it  was  the  discovery  of  Sanskrit  that  was 
the  real  tiu-ning-point  in  the  history  of  linguistics,  and  there  is 
some  truth  in  this  assertion,  though  we  shall  see  on  the  one  hand 
that  Sanskrit  was  not  in  itself  enough  to  give  to  those  who  studied 
it  the  true  insight  into  the  essence  of  language  and  linguistic  science, 
and  on  the  other  hand  that  real  genius  enabled  at  least  one  man 
to  grasp  essential  truths  about  the  relationships  and  development 
of  languages  even  without  a  knowledge  of  Sanskrit.  Still,  it  must 
be  said  that  the  first  acq[uaintance  with  this  language  gave  a  mighty 
impulse  to  linguistic  studies  and  exerted  a  lasting  influence  on 
the  way  in  Avhich  most  European  languages  were  viewed  by  scholars, 
and  it  will  therefore  be  necessary  here  briefly  to  sketch  the  history 
of  these  studies.  India  was  very  little  known  in  Europe  till  the 
mighty  struggle  between  the  French  and  the  English  for  the  mastery 
of  its  wealth  excited  a  wide  interest  also  in  its  ancient  culture. 
It  was  but  natural  that  on  this  intellectual  domain,  too,  the  French 
and  the  English  should  at  first  be  rivals  and  that  we  should  find 
both  nations  represented  in  the  pioneers  of  Sanskrit  scholarship. 
The  French  Jesuit  missionary  Coeurdoux  as  early  as  1767  sent  to 
the  French  Institut  a  memoir  in  which  he  called  attention  to  the 
similarity  of  many  Sanskrit  words  with  Latin,  and  even  compared 
the  flexion  of  the  present  indicative  and  subjunctive  of  Sanskrit 
asmi,  '  I  am,'  with  the  corresponding  forms  of  Latin  grammar. 
Unfortunately,  however,  his  work  was  not  printed  till  forty  years 
later,  when  the  same  discovery  had  been  announced  independently 
by  others.  The  next  scholar  to  be  mentioned  in  this  connexion 
is  Sir  William  Jones,  who  in  1796  uttered  the  following  memorable 
words,  which  have  often  been  quoted  in  books  on  the  history  of 
hnguistics :  "  The  Sanscrit  language,  whatever  be  its  antiquity, 
is  of  a  wonderful  structure  ;  more  perfect  than  the  Greek,  more 
copious  than  the  Latin  and  more  exquisitely  refined  than  either  ; 
yet  bearing  to  both  of  them  a  stronger  affinitj^  both  in  the  roots 
of  verbs  and  in  the  forms  of  grammar,  than  could  possibly  have 
been  produced  by  accident ;  so  strong,  indeed,  that  no  philologer 
could  examine  them  all  three  without  believing  them  to  have 
sprung  from  some  common  source,  which,  perhaps,  no  longer 
exists.  There  is  a  similar  reason,  though  not  quite  so  forcible,  for 
supposing  that  both  the  Gothic  and  the  Celtic  .  .  .  had  the  same 
origin  with  the  Sanscrit ;   and  the  old  Persian  might  be  added  to 

3 


34     BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  ii 

the  same  family."  Sir  W.  Jones,  however,  did  nothing  to  carry 
out  in  detail  the  compari«on  thus  inaugurated,  and  it  was  reserved 
for  younger  men  to  follow  up  the  clue  he  had  given. 


II. — §  2.  Friedrich  von  Schlegel. 

One  of  the  books  that  exercised  a  great  influence  on  the  develop- 
ment of  linguistic  science  in  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century 
was  Friedrich  von  Schlegel's  Uebcr  die  sprache  und  u-fisheit 
der  Indier  (1808).  Schlegel  had  studied  Sanskrit  for  some  years 
in  Paris,  and  in  his  romantic  enthusiasm  he  hoped  that  the  study 
of  the  old  Indian  books  would  bring  about  a  revolution  in  European 
thought  similar  to  that  produced  in  the  Renaissance  through  the 
revival  of  the  study  of  Greek.  We  are  here  concerned  exclusively 
with  his  linguistic  theories,  but  to  his  mind  they  were  inseparable 
from  Indian  religion  and  philosophy,  or  rather  religious  and  philo- 
sophic poetry.  He  is  struck  by  the  similarity  between  Sanskrit 
and  the  best-known  European  languages,  and  gives  quite  a  number 
of  words  from  Sanskrit  found  with  iScarcely  any  change  in  German, 
Greek  and  Latin.  He  repudiates  the  idea  that  these  similarities 
might  be  accidental  or  due  to  borrowings  on  the  side  of  the  Indians, 
saying  expressly  that  the  proof  of  original  relationship  between 
these  languages,  as  well  as  of  the  greater  age  of  Sanskrit,  lies 
in  the  far-reaching  correspondences  in  the  whole  grammatical 
structure  of  these  as  opposed  to  many  other  languages.  In  this 
connexion  it  is  noticeable  that  he  is  the  first  to  speak  of  '  com- 
parative grammar  '  (p.  28),  but,  like  Moses,  he  only  looks  into  this 
promised  land  without  entering  it.  Indeed,  his  method  of  compari- 
son precludes  him  from  being  the  founder  of  the  new  science,  for 
he  says  himself  (p.  6)  that  he  will  refrain  from  stating  any  rules 
for  change  or  substitution  of  letters  (sounds),  and  require  complete 
identity  of  the  words  used  as  proofs  of  the  descent  of  languages. 
He  adds  that  in  other  cases,  "  where  intermediate  stages  are  hisitori- 
cally  demonstrable,  we  may  derive  giorno  from  dies,  and  when 
Spanish  so  often  has  h  for  Latin  /,  or  Latin  p  very  often  becomes  / 
in  the  German  form  of  the  same  word,  and  c  not  rarely  becomes  h 
[by  the  way,  an  interesting  foreshadowing  of  one  part  of  the  dis- 
covery of  the  Germanic  sound -shifting],  then  this  may  be  the 
foundation  of  analogical  conclusions  with  regard  to  other  les6 
evident  instances."  If  he  had  followed  up  this  idea  by  establishing 
similar  '  sound-laws,'  as  we  now  say,  between  Sanskrit  and  other 
languages,  he  would  have  been  many  years  ahead  of  his  time  ; 
as  it  is,  his  comparisons  are  those  of  a  dilettante,  and  he  sometimes 
falls  into  the  pitfalls  of  accidental  similarities  while  overlooking 
the  real  correspondences.     He  is  also  led  astray  by  the  idea  of  a 


§2]  FRIEDRICH    VON    SCHLEGEL  35 

particularly  close  relationship  betAveen  Persian  and  German,  an 
idea  which  at  that  time  was  widely  spread  ^ — we  find  it  in  Jenisch 
and  even  in  Bopp's  first  book. 

Schlegel  is  not  afraid  of  surveying,  the  whole  world  of  human 
languages  ;  he  divides  them  into  two  classes,  one  comprising 
Sanskrit  and  its  congeners,  and  the  second  all  other  languages. 
In  the  former  he  finds  organic  growth  of  the  roots  as  shown  by 
their  capabilitj'  of  inner  change  or,  as  he  terms  it,  '  flexion,'  while 
in  the  latter  class  everything  is  effected  by  the  addition  of  affixes 
(prefixes  and  suffixes).  In  Greek  he  admits  that  it  would  be 
possible  to  believe  in  the  possibility  of  the  grammatical  endings 
(bildungssylben)  having  arisen  from  particles  and  auxiliary 
words  amalgamated  into  the  word  itself,  but  in  Sanskrit  even 
the  last  semblance  of  this  possibility  disappears,  and  it  becomes 
necessary  to  confess  that  the  structure  of  the  language  is  formed 
in  a  thoroughly  organic  way  through  flexion,  i.e.  inner  changes 
and  modifications  of  the  radical  sound,  and  not  composed  merely 
mechanically  by  the  addition  of  words  and  particles.  He  admits, 
however,  that  affixes  in  some  other  languages  have  brought  about 
something  that  resembles  real  flexion.  On  the  whole  he  finds  that 
the  movement  of  grammatical  art  and  perfection  (der  gang  der 
bloss  grammatischen  kunst  und  ausbildung,  p.  56)  goes  in  opposite 
directions  in  the  two  species  of  languages.  In  the  organic  lan- 
guages, which  represent  the  highest  state,  the  beauty  and  art  of  their 
structure  is  apt  to  be  lost  through  indolence  ;  and  German  as  well 
as  Romanic  and  modern  Indian  languages  show  this  degeneracy 
when  compared  with  the  earlier  forms  of  the  same  languages. 
In  the  affix  languages,  on  the  other  hand,  we  see  that  the  beginnings 
are  completely  artless,  but  the  '  art '  in  them  grows  more  and  more 
perfect  the  more  the  affixes  are  fused  with  the  main  word. 

As  to  the  question  of  the  ultimate  origin  of  language,  Schlegel 
thinks  that  the  diversity  of  linguistic  structure  points  to  different 
beginnings.  While  some  languages,  such  as  Manchu,  are  so  inter- 
woven with  onomatopoeia  that  imitation  of  natural  sounds  must 
have  played  the  greatest  role  in  their  formation,  this  is  by  no 
means  the  case  in  other  languages,  and  the  j)erfection  of  the  oldest 
organic  or  flexional  languages,  such  as  Sanskrit,  shows  that  they 
cannot  be  derived  from  merely  animal  sounds  ;  indeed,  they  form  an 
additional  proof,  if  any  such  were  needed,  that  men  did  not  every- 
where start  from  a  brutish  state,  but  that  the  clearest  and  intensest 
reason  existed  from  the  very  first  beginning.  On  all  these  points 
Schlegel 's  ideas  foreshadow  views  that  are  found  in  later  works  ; 
and  it  is  probable  that  his  fame  as  a  writer  outside  the  philological 
field  gave  to  his  linguistic  speculations  a  notoriety  which  his  often 

»  It  dates  back  to  Vulcaniiis,   1597  ;  see  Streitberg,  IF  35.   182. 


36    BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  ii 

loose  and  superficial  reasonings  would  not  otherwise  have  acquired 
for  them. 

Schlegel's  bipartition  of  the  languages  of  the  world  carries 
in  it  the  germ  of  a  tripartition.  On  the  .lowest  stage  of  his  second 
class  he  places  Chinese,  in  which,  as  he  acknowledges,  the  particles 
denoting  secondary  sense  modifications  consist  in  monosyllables 
that  are  completely  independent  of  the  actual  word.  It  is  clear  that 
from  Schlegel's  own  point  of  view  we  cannot  here  properly  speak 
of  '  affixes,'  and  thus  Chinese  really,  though  Schlegel  himself  does 
not  say  so,  falls  outside  his  affix  languages  and  forms  a  class  by 
itself.  On  the  other  hand,  his  arguments  for  reckoning  Semitic 
languages  among  affix  languages  are  very  weak,  and  he  seems 
also  somewhat  inclined  to  say  that  much  in  their  structure  re- 
sembles real  flexion.  If  we  introduce  these  two  changes  into  his 
system,  we  arrive  at  the  threefold  division  found  in  slightly  different 
shapes  in  most  subsequent  works  on  general  linguistics,  the  first 
to  give  it  being  perhaj)s  Schlegel's  brother,  A.  W.  Schlegel,  who 
speaks  of  (1)  les  langues  sans  aucune  structure  grammaticale — 
under  which  misleading  term  he  understands  Chinese  with  its 
unchangeable  monosyllabic  words  ;  (2)  les  langues  qui  emploient 
des  affixes  ;    (3)  les  langues  a  inflexions. 

Like  his  brother,  A.  W.  Schlegel  places  the  flexional  languages 
highest  and  thinks  them  alone  '  organic'  On  the  other  hand,  he 
subdivides  flexional  languages  into  two  classes,  synthetic  and 
analytic,  the  latter  using  personal  pronouns  and  auxiliaries  in 
the  conjugation  of  verbs,  prepositions  to  supply  the  want  of 
cases,  and  adverbs  to  express  the  degrees  of  comparison.  While 
the  origin  of  the  synthetic  languages  loses  itself  in  the  darkness 
of  ages,  the  analytic  languages  have  been  created  in  modern  times  ; 
all  those  that  we  know  are  due  to  the  decomposition  of  sjoithetic 
languages.  These  remarks  on  the  division  of  languages  are  found 
in  the  Introduction  to  the  book  Observations  sur  la  langue  et 
la  litterature  provenQole  (1818)  and  are  thus  primarily  meant  to 
account  for  the  contrast  between  synthetic  Latin  and  analytic 
Romanic. 

II. — §  3.  Rasmus  Rask. 

We  now  come  to  the  three  greatest  names  among  the  initiators 
of  linguistic  science  in  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
If  we  give  them  in  their  alphabetical  order,  Bopp,  Grimm  and 
Rask,  we  also  give  them  in  the  order  of  merit  in  which  most  sub- 
sequent historians  have  placed  them.  The  works  that  constitute 
their  first  claims  to  the  title  of  founder  of  the  new  science  came 
in  close  succession,  Bopp's  Conjugationssystem  in  1816,  Rask's 
Undersf^geUe  in  1818,  and  the  first  volume  of  Grimm's  Grammatik  in 


§3]  RASMUS    RASK  87 

1819.  While  Bopp  is  entirely  independent  of  the  two  others,  we 
shall  sec  that  Grimm  was  deeply  influenced  by  Rask,  and  as  the 
latter's  contributions  to  our  science  began  some  years  before  his 
chief  work  just  mentioned  (which  had  also  been  finished  in  manu- 
script in  1814,  thus  two  years  before  Bopp's  Conjugationssystem), 
the  best  order  in  which  to  deal  with  the  three  men  will  perhaps 
be  to  take  Rask  first,  then  to  mention  Grimm,  who  in  some  ways 
was  his  pupil,  and  finally  to  treat  of  Bopp  :  in  this  way  we  shall 
also  be  enabled  to  see  Bopp  in  close  relation  with  the  subsequent 
development  of  Comparative  Grammar,  on  which  he,  and  not 
Rask,  exerted  the  strongest  influence. 

Born  in  a  peasant's  hut  in  the  heart  of  Denmark  in  1787,  Rasmus 
Rask  was  a  grammarian  from  his  boyhood.  When  a  copy  of  the 
Heimskringla  was  given  him  as  a  school  prize,  he  at  once,  without 
any  grammar  or  dictionary,  set  about  establishing  paradigms,  and 
so,  before  he  left  school,  acquired  proficiency  in  Icelandic,  as  well 
as  in  many  other  languages.  At  the  University  of  Copenhagen 
he  continued  in  the  same  course,  constantly  widened  his  linguistic 
horizon  and  penetrated  into  the  grammatical  structure  of  the 
most  diverse  languages.  Icelandic  (Old  Norse),  however,  remained 
his  favourite  study,  and  it  filled  him  with  enthusiasm  and  national 
pride  that  "  our  ancestors  had  such  an  excellent  language,"  the 
excellency  being  measured  chiefly  by  the  full  flexional  system  which 
Icelandic  shared  with  the  classical  tongues,  partly  also  by  the 
pure,  unmixed  state  of  the  Icelandic  vocabulary.  His  first  book 
(1811)  was  an  Icelandic  grammar,  an  admirable  production  when 
we  consider  the  meagre  work  done  previously  in  this  field.  With 
great  lucidity  he  reduces  the  intricate  forms  of  the  language  into 
a  consistent  system,  and  his  penetrating  insight  into  the  essence 
of  language  is  seen  when  he  explains  the  vowel  changes,  which  we 
now  comprise  under  the  name  of  mutation  or  umlaut,  as  due  to 
the  approximation  of  the  vowel  of  the  stem  to  that  of  the  ending, 
at  that  time  a  totally  new  point  of  view.  This  we  gather  from 
Grimm's  review,  in  which  Rask's  explanation  is  said  to  be  "  more 
astute  than  true  "  ("  mehr  scharfsinnig  als  w&hr,"  Kleiner e  schriften, 
7.  515),  Rask  even  sees  the  reason  of  the  change  in  the  plural 
blo^  as  against  the  singular  bla^  in  the  former  having  once  ended 
in  -u,  which  has  since  disappeared.  This  is,  so  far  as  I  know,  the 
first  inference  ever  drawn  to  a  prehistoric  state  of  language. 

In  1814,  during  a  prolonged  stay  in  Iceland,  Rask  sent  down 
to  Copenhagen  his  most  important  work,  the  prize  essay  on  the 
origin  of  the  Old  Norse  language  {Unders^gelse  om  det  gamle 
nordiske  eller  islandske  sprogs  oprindelse)  which  for  various 
reasons  was  not  printed  till  1818.  If  it  had  been  published  when 
it  was  finished,  and  especially  if  it  had  been  printed  in  a  language 


38    BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  ii 

better  known  than  Danish,  Rask  might  well  have  been  styled  the 
founder  of  the  modern  science  of  language,  for  his  work  contains 
the  best  exposition  of  the  true  method  of  linguistic  research 
written  in  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  and  applies 
this  method  to  the  solution  of  a  long  series  of  important  questions. 
Only  one  part  of  it  was  ever  translated  into  another  language, 
and  this  was  unfortunately  buried  in  an  appendix  to  Vater's 
Vergleichnngstafeln,  1822.  Yet  Rask's  work  even  now  repays 
careful  perusal,  and  I  shall  therefore  give  a  brief  resume  of  it^ 
principal  contents. 

Language  according  to  Rask  is  our  principal  means  of  finding 
out  anything  about  the  history  of  nations  before  the  existence  of 
written  documents,  for  though  everything  may  change  in  religion, 
customs,  laws  and  institutions,  language  generally  remains,  if  not 
unchanged,  yet  recognizable  even  after  thousands  of  years.  But 
in  order  to  find  out  anything  about  the  relationship  of  a  language 
we  must  proceed  methodically  and  examine  its  whole  structure 
instead  of  comparing  mere  details  ;  what  is  here  of  prime  importance 
is  the  grammatical  system,  because  words  are  very  often  taken 
over  from  one  language  to  another,  but  very  rarely  grammatical 
forms.  The  capital  error  in  most  of  what  has  been  written  on 
this  subject  is  that  this  important  point  has  been  overlooked. 
That  language  which  has  the  most  complicated  grammar  is  nearest 
to  the  source  ;  however  mixed  a  language  may  be,  it  belongs  to 
the  same  family  as  another  if  it  has  the  most  essential,  most 
material  and  indispensable  words  in  common  with  it ;  pronouns 
and  numerals  are  in  this  respect  most  decisive.  If  in  such  words 
there  are  so  many  points  of  agreement  between  two  languages  that 
it  is  possible  to  frame  rules  for  the  transitions  of  letters  (in  other 
passages  Rask  more  correctly  says  sounds)  from  the  one  language 
to  the  other,  there  is  a  fundamental  kinship  between  the  two 
languages,  more  particularly  if  there  are  corresponding  similarities 
in  their  structure  and  constitution.  This  is  a  most  important 
thesis,  and  Rask  supplements  it  by  saying  that  transitions  of 
sounds  are  naturally  dependent  on  their  organ  and  manner  of 
production. 

Next  Rask  proceeds  to  apply  these  principles  to  his  task  of 
finding  out  the  origin  of  the  Old  Icelandic  language.  He  describee 
its  position  in  the  '  Gothic '  (Gothonic,  Germanic)  group  and 
then  looks  round  to  find  congeners  elsewhere.  He  rapidly  discards 
Greenlandic  and  Basque  as  being  too  remote  in  grammar  and 
vocabulary  ;  with  regard  to  Keltic  languages  he  hesitates,  but 
finally  decides  in  favour  of  denying  relationship.  (He  was  soon 
to  see  his  error  in  this  ;  see  below.)  Next  he  deals  at  some  length 
with  Finnic  and  Lapp,  and  comes  to  the  conclusion  that  the  simi- 


§3]  RASMUS    RASK  39 

larities  are  due  to  loans  rather  than  to  original  kinship.  But  when 
he  comes  to  the  Slavonic  languages  his  utterances  have  a  different 
ring,  for  he  is  here  able  to  disclose  so  many  similarities  in  funda- 
mentals that  he  ranges  these  languages  within  the  same  great 
family  as  Icelandic.  The  same  is  true  with  regard  to  Lithuanian 
and  Lettic,  which  are  here  for  the  first  time  correctly  placed  as 
an  independent  sub-famih',  though  closely  akin  to  Slavonic.  The 
comparisons  with  Latin,  and  especially  with  Greek,  are  even  more 
detailed  ;  and  Rask  in  these  chapters  really  presents  us  with  a  suc- 
cinct, but  on  the  whole  marvellously  correct,  comparative  grammar 
of  Gothonic,  Slavonic,  Lithuanian,  Latin  and  Greek,  besides  examin- 
ing numerous  lexical  correspondences.  He  does  not  yet  know  any 
of  the  related  Asiatic  languages,  but  throws  out  the  hint  that 
Persian  and  Indian  may  be  the  remote  source  of  Icelandic  through 
Greek.  Greek  he  considers  to  be  the  '  source  '  or  '  root '  of  the 
Gothonic  languages,  though  he  expresses  himself  -with  a  degree  of 
uncertainty  which  forestalls  the  correct  notion  that  these  languages 
have  all  of  them  sprung  from  the  same  extinct  and  unknown 
language.  This  view  is  very  clearly  expressed  in  a  letter  he  wrote 
from  St.  Petersburg  in  the  same  year  in  which  his  Unders'^gelse 
was  published  ;  he  here  says  :  "  I  divide  our  family  of  languages 
in  this  way  :  the  Indian  (Dekanic,  Hindostanic),  Iranic  (Persian, 
Armenian,  Ossetic),  Thracian  (Greek  and  Latin),  Sarmatian 
(Lettic  and  Slavonic),  Gothic  (Germanic  and  Skandinavian) 
and  Keltic  (Britannic  and  Gaelic)  tribes "  (SA  2.  281,  dated 
June   11,   1818). 

This  is  the  fullest  and  clearest  account  of  the  relationships 
of  our  family  of  languages  found  for  many  years,  and  Rask  showed 
true  genius  in  the  way  in  which  he  saw  what  languages  belonged 
together  and  how  they  were  related.  About  the  same  time  he  gave 
a  classification  of  the  Finno-Ugrian  family  of  languages  which  is 
pronounced  by  such  living  authorities  on  these  languages  as  Vilhelm 
Thomsen  and  Emil  Setala  to  be  superior  to  most  later  attempts. 
"\Mien  travelling  in  India  he  recognized  the  true  position  of  Zend, 
about  which  previous  scholars  had  held  the  most  erroneous  views, 
and  his  surve}-  of  the  languages  of  India  and  Persia  was  thought 
valuable  enough  in  1863  to  be  printed  from  his  manuscript,  forty 
years  after  it  was  written.  He  was  also  the  first  to  see  that  the 
Dravidian  (by  him  called  Malabaric)  languages  were  totally  different 
from  Sanskrit.  In  his  short  essay  on  Zend  (1826)  he  also  inci- 
dentally gave  the  correct  value  of  two  letters  in  the  first  cunei- 
form writing,  and  thus  made  an  important  contribution  towards 
the  final  deciphering  of  these  inscriptions. 

His  long  tour  (1816-23)  through  Sweden,  Finland,  Russia, 
the  Caucasus,  Persia  and  India  was  spent  in  the  most  intense  study 


40    BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENT^H  CENTURY     [ch.  ii 

of  a  great  variety  of  languages,  but  unfortunately  brought  on  the 
illness  and  disappointments  which,  together  with  economic  anxieties, 
marred  the  rest  of  his  short  life. 

When  Rask  died  in  1832  he  had  written  a  great  number  of 
grammars  of  single  languages,  all  of  them  remarkable  for  their 
accuracy  in  details  and  clear  systematic  treatment,  more  parti- 
cularly of  morphology,  and  some  of  them  breaking  new  ground ; 
besides  his  Icelandic  grammar  already  mentioned,  his  Anglo-Saxon, 
Frisian  and  Lapp  grammars  should  be  specially  named.  Historical 
grammar  in  the  strict  sense  is  perhaps  not  his  forte,  though  in  a 
remarkable  essay  of  the  year  1815  he  explains  historically  a  great 
many  features  of  Danish  grammar,  and  in  his  Spanish  and  Italian 
grammars  he  in  some  respects  forestalls  Diez's  historical  explana- 
tions. But  in  some  points  he  stuck  to  erroneous  views,  a  notable 
instance  being  his  system  of  old  Gothonic  '  long  vowels,'  which 
was  reared  on  the  assumption  that  modern  Icelandic  pronunciation 
reflects  the  pronunciation  of  primitive  times,  while  it  is  really  a 
recent  development,  as  Grimm  saw  from  a  comparison  of  all  the 
old  languages.  With  regard  to  consonants,  however,  Rask  was 
the  clearer-sighted  of  the  two,  and  throughout  he  had  this  immense 
advantage  over  most  of  the  comparative  linguists  of  his  age,  that 
he  had  studied  a  great  many  languages  at  first  hand  with  native 
speakers,  while  the  others  knew  languages  chiefly  or  exclusively 
through  the  medium  of  books  and  manuscripts.  In  no  work  of 
that  period,  or  even  of  a  much  later  time,  are  found  so  many  first- 
hand observations  of  living  speech  as  in  Rask's  Retskrivningslcsre. 
Handicapped  though  he  was  in  many  ways,  by  poverty  and  illness 
and  by  the  fact  that  he  wrote  in  a  language  so  little  known  as 
Danish,  Rasmus  Rask,  through  his  wide  outlook,  his  critical 
sagacity  and  aversion  to  all  fanciful  theorizing,  stands  out  as 
one  of  the  foremost  leaders  of  linguistic  science.^ 


II.— §4.  Jacob  Grimm. 

Jacob  Grimm's  career  was  totally  different  from  Rask's.  Born 
in  1785  as  the  son  of  a  lawyer,  he  himself  studied  law  and  came 
imder  the  influence  of  Savigny,  whose  view  of  legal  institutions  as 
the  outcome  of  gradual  development  in  intimate  connexion  with 
popular  tradition  and  the  whole  intellectual  and  moral  life  of  the 

*  I  have  given  a  life  of  Ra-sk  and  an  appraisement  of  his  work  in  the 
small  volume  Rasmus  Rask  (Copenhagen,  Gyldendal,  1918).  See  also  Vilh. 
Thomson,  Samlede  afhandlinger,  1.  47  ff.  and  125  ff.  A  good  and  full 
account  of  Rask's  work  is  found  in  Raumer,  Gesch. ;  of.  also  Paul,  Gr. 
Recent  short  appreciations  of  his  genius  may  be  read  in  Trombetti, 
Come  si  fa  la  critica,  1907,  p.  41,  Meillet,  LI,  p.  415,  Hirt,  Idg,  pp.  74 
and  578. 


§4]  JACOB    GRBIM  41 

people  appealed  strongly  to  the  young  man's  imagination.  But 
he  was  d^a^vn  even  more  to  that  study  of  old  German  popular 
poetry  which  then  began  to  bo  the  fashion,  thanks  to  Tieck  and 
other  Romanticists  ;  and  when  he  was  in  Paris  to  assist  Savigny 
with  his  historico-legal  research,  the  old  German  manuscripts  in 
the  Biblioth^que  nationale  nourished  his  enthusiasm  for  the 
poetical  treasures  of  the  Middle  Ages.  He  became  a  librarian 
and  brought  out  his  first  book,  Ueber  den  altdeutschen  meistergesang 
(1811).  At  the  sr.me  time,  with  his  brother  Wilhelm  as  constant 
companion  and  fellow-worker,  he  began  collecting  popular  tradi- 
tions, of  which  he  published  a  first  instalment  in  his  famous  Kinder- 
und  hausmdrchen  (1812  ff.),  a  work  whose  learned  notes  and  com- 
parisons may  be  said  to  have  laid  the  foundation  of  the  science  of 
folklore.  Language  at  first  had  only  a  subordinate  interest  to 
him,  and  when  he  tried  his  hand  at  etymology,  he  indulged  in  the 
wildest  guesses,  according  to  the  method  (or  want  of  method)  of 
previous  centuries.  A.  W.  Schlegel's  criticism  of  his  early  attempts 
in  this  field,  and  still  more  Rask's  example,  opened  Grimm's  eyes 
to  the  necessity  of  a  stricter  method,  and  he  soon  threw  himself 
with  great  energy  into  a  painstaking  and  exact  study  of  the  oldest 
stages  of  the  German  language  and  its  congeners.  In  his  review 
(1812)  of  Rask's  Icelandic  grammar  he  writes  :  "  Each  individuality, 
even  in  the  world  of  languages,  should  be  respected  as  sacred  ; 
it  is  desirable  that  even  the  smallest  and  most  despised  dialect 
should  be  left  only  to  itself  and  to  its  own  nature  and  in  nowise 
subjected  to  violence,  because  it  is  sure  to  have  some  secret  advan- 
tages over  the  greatest  and  most  highly  valued  language."  Here 
we  meet  with  that  valuation  of  the  hitherto  overlooked  popular 
dialects  which  sprang  from  the  Romanticists'  interest  in  the 
'  people '  and  everything  it  had  produced.  Much  valuable 
linguistic  work  was  directly  inspired  by  this  feeling  and  by  con- 
scious opposition  to  the  old  philology,  that  occupied  itself  exclu- 
sively with  the  two  classical  languages  and  the  upper-class 
literature  embodied  in  them.  As  Scherer  expresses  it  {Jacob 
Grimm,  2te  ausg.,  Berlin,  1885,  p.  152) :  "  The  brothers  Grimm 
applied  to  the  old  national  literature  and  to  popular  traditions 
the  old  philological  virtue  of  exactitude,  which  had  up  to  then 
been  bestowed  solely  on  Greek  and  Roman  classics  and  on  the  Bible. 
They  extended  the  field  of  strict  philology,  as  they  extended  the 
field  of  recognized  poetry.  They  discarded  the  aristocratic  narrow- 
mindedness  with  which  philologists  looked  down  on  unwritten 
tradition,  on  popular  ballads,  legends,  fairy  tales,  superstition, 
nursery  rimes.  ...  In  the  hands  of  the  two  Grimms  philology 
became  national  and  popular  ;  and  at  the  same  time  a  pattern  was 
created  for  the  scientific  study  of  all  the  peoples  of  the  earth  and 


42     BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  ii 

for  a  comparative  investigation  of  the  entire  mental  life  of 
mankind,  of  which  written  literature  is  nothing  but  a  small 
epitome." 

But  though  Grimm  thus  broke  loose  from  the  traditions  of 
classical  philology,  he  still  carried  with  him  one  relic  of  it,  namely 
the  standard  by  which  the  merits  of  different  languages  were 
measured.  "  In  reading  carefully  the  old  Gothonic  (altdeutschen) 
sources,  I  was  every  day  discovering  forms  and  perfections  which 
we  generally  envy  the  Greeks  and  Romans  when  we  consider  the 
present  condition  of  our  language.".  .  .  "  Six  hundred  years  ago 
every  rustic  knew,  that  is  to  say  practised  daily,  perfections  and 
niceties  in  the  German  language  of  which  the  best  grammarians 
nowadays  do  not  even  dream  ;  in  the  poetry  of  Wolfram  von 
Eschenbach  and  of  Hartmann  von  Aue,  who  had  never  heard  of 
declension  and  conjugation,  nay  who  perhaps  did  not  even  know 
how  to  read  and  write,  many  differences  in  the  flexion  and  use  of 
nouns  and  verbs  are  still  nicely  and  unerringly  observed,  which 
we  have  gradually  to  rediscover  in  learned  guise,  but  dare  not 
reintroduce,  for  language  ever  follows  its  inalterable  course." 

Grimm  then  sets  about  WTiting  his  great  historical  and  com 
parative  Deutsche  Grammatik,  taking  the  term  '  deutsch  '  in 
its  widest  and  hardly  justifiable  sense  of  what  is  now  ordinarily 
called  Germanic  and  which  is  in  this  work  called  Gothonic.  The 
first  volume  appeared  in  1819,  and  in  the  preface  we  see  that  he 
was  quite  clear  that  he  was  breaking  new  ground  and  introducing 
a  new  method  of  looking  at  grammar.  He  speaks  of  previous 
German  grammars  and  says  expressly  that  he  does  not  want  his 
to  be  ranged  with  them.  He  charges  them  with  unspeakable 
pedantry  ;  they  wanted  to  dogmatize  magisterially,  while  to  Grimm 
language,  like  everything  natural  and  moral,  is  an  unconscious 
and  unnoticed  secret  which  is  implanted  in  us  in  youth.  Every 
German  therefore  who  speaks  his  language  naturally,  i.e.  untaught, 
may  call  himself  his  own  living  grammar  and  leave  all  school- 
masters' rules  alone.  Grimm  accordingly  has  no  wish  to  prescribe 
anything,  but  to  observe  what  has  grown  naturally,  and  very 
appropriately  he  dedicates  his  work  to  Sa\'igny,  who  has  taught 
him  how  institutions  grow  in  the  life  of  a  nation.  In  the  new 
preface  to  the  second  edition  there  are  also  some  noteworthy 
indications  of  the  changed  attitude.  "  I  am  hostile  to  general 
logical  notions  in  grammar  ;  they  conduce  apparently  to  strict- 
ness and  solidity  of  definition,  but  hamper  observation,  which  I 
take  to  be  the  soul  of  linguistic  science.  ...  As  my  starting-point 
was  to  trace  the  never-resting  (unstillstchende)  element  of  our 
language  which  changes  with  time  and  place,  it  became  necessary 
for  me  to  admit  one  dialect  after  the  other,  and  I  could  not  even 


§4]  JACOB    GRIMM  48 

forbear  to  glance  at  those  foreign  languages  that  are  ultimately 
related  with  ours." 

Here  we  have  the  first  clear  programme  of  that  historical 
school  which  has  since  then  been  the  dominating  one  in  linguistics. 
But  as  language  according  to  this  new  point  of  view  was  constantlj'^ 
changing  and  developing,  so  also,  during  these  years,  were  Grimm's 
o^vn  ideas.  And  the  man  who  then  exercised  the  greatest  influence 
on  him  was  Rasmus  Rask.  When  Grimm  wrote  the  first  edition 
of  his  Grammatik  (1819),  he  knew  nothing  of  Rask  but  the  Icelandic 
grammar,  but  just  before  finishing  his  own  volume  Rask's  prize 
essay  reached  him,  and  in  the  preface  he  at  once  speaks  of  it  in 
the  highest  terms  of  praise,  as  he  does  also  in  several  letters  of 
this  period  ;  he  is  equally  enthusiastic  about  Rask's  Anglo-Saxon 
gi-ammar  and  the  Swedish  edition  of  his  Icelandic  grammar,  neither 
of  which  reached  him  till  after  his  own  first  volume  had  been  printed 
off.  The  consequence  was  that  instead  of  going  on  to  the  second 
volume,  Grimm  entirely  recast  the  first  volume  and  brought  it 
out  in  a  new  shape  in  1822.  The  chief  innovation  was  the  phono- 
logy or,  as  he  calls  it,  "  Erstes  buch.  Von  den  buchstaben,"  which 
was  entirely  absent  in  1819,  but  now  ran  to  595  pages. 


U.— §  5.  The  Sound  Shift. 

This  first  book  in  the  1822  volume  contains  much,  perhaps 
most,  of  what  constitutes  Grimm's  fame  as  a  grammarian,  notably 
his  exposition  of  the  '  sound  shift '  (lautverschiebung),  which  it 
has  been  customary  in  England  since  Max  Miiller  to  term  '  Grimm's 
Law.'  If  any  one  man  is  to  give  his  name  to  this  law,  a  better  name 
would  be  '  Rask's  Lav/,'  for  all  these  transitions,  Lat.  Gr.  p=f, 
t  =  y>  {th),  k  =  h,  etc.,  are  enumerated  in  Rask's  Unders^gelse, 
p.  168,  which  Grimm  knew  before  he  wrote  a  single  word  about 
the  sound  shift. 

Now,  it  is  interesting  to  compare  the  two  scholars'  treatment 
of  these  transitions.  The  sober-minded,  matter-of-fact  Rask 
contents  himself  with  a  bare  statement  of  the  facts,  with  just  enough 
well-chosen  examples  to  establish  the  correspondence  ;  the  way 
in  which  he  arranges  the  sounds  shows  that  he  saw  their  parallelism 
clearly  enough,  though  he  did  not  attempt  to  bring  everything 
under  one  single  formula,  any  more  than  he  tried  to  explain  why 
these  sounds  had  changed.^    Grimm  multiplies  the  examples  and 

^  Only  in  one  subordinate  point  did  Rask  make  a  mistake  (b  =  6),  which 
is  all  the  more  venial  as  there  are  extremely  few  examples  of  this  sound. 
Bredsdorf?  (Aaraageme,  1821,  p.  21)  evidently  had  the  law  from  Rask,  and 
gives  it  in  the  compreheiisive  fonnula  which  Paul  (Gr.  1.  86)  misses  in  Rask 
and  gives  as  Griram's  meritorious  improvement  on  Rask.     "  The  Germanic 


44    BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  ii 

then  systematizes  the  whole  process  in  one  formula  so  as  to  comprise 
also  the  '  second  shift '  found  in  High  German  alone — a  shift 
well  known  to  Rask,  though  treated  by  him  in  a  different  place 
(p.  68  f.)-     Grimm's  formula  looks  thus  : 


Greek  p     b      f 

Gothic         f     p      b 
High  G.      b(v)f      p 


t       d      th    I     k      g      ch 
th     t       d      I     h      k      g 
d      z       t      I    g      ch    k, 


which  may  be  expressed  generally  thus,  that  tenuis  (T)  becomes 
aspirate  (A)  and  then  media  (M),  etc.,  or,  tabulated  : 

Greek  T         M         A 

Gothic        A         T         M 
High  G.     M        A         T. 

For  this  Grimm  would  of  course  have  deserved  great  credit, 
because  a  comprehensive  formula  is  more  scientific  than  a  rough 
statement  of  facts — if  the  formula  had  been  correct ;  but  unfortu- 
nately it  is  not  so.  In  the  first  place,  it  breaks  down  in  the  very 
first  instance,  for  there  is  no  media  in  High  German  corresponding 
to  Gr.  p  and  Gothic  /  (cf.  poils,  fotus,Juss,  etc.)  ;  secondly,  High 
German  has  h  just  as  Gothic  has,  corresponding  to  Greek  k  (cf. 
kardia,  hairto,  herz,  etc.),  and  where  it  has  g,  Gothic  has  also  g  in 
accordance  with  rules  unknown  to  Grimm  and  not  explained  till 
long  afterwards  (by  Verner).  But  the  worst  thing  is  that  the 
whole  specious  generalization  produces  the  impression  of  regularity 
and  uniformity  only  through  the  highly  unscientific  use  of  the 
word  '  aspirate,'  which  is  made  to  cover  such  phonetically  disparate 
things  as  (1)  combination  of  stop  with  following  h,  (2)  combination 
of  stop  with  following  fricative,  pf,  ts  written  z,  (3)  voiceless  fricative, 
/,  5  in  G.  das,  (4)  voiced  fricative,  v,  t5  written  th,  and  (5)  h.  Grimm 
rejoiced  in  his  formula,  giving  as  it  does  three  chronological  stages 
in  each  of  the  three  subdivisions  (tenuis,  media,  aspirate)  of  each  of 
the  three  classes  of  consonants  (labial,  dental,'  guttural  ').  This 
evidently  took  hold  of  his  fancy  through  the  mystic  power  of  the 
number  three,  which  he  elsewhere  (Gesch  1.  191,  cf.  241)  finds 
pervading  language  generally  :  three  original  vowels,  a,  i,  u,  three 
genders,  three  numbers  (singular,  dual,  plural),  three  persons,  three 
'  voices  '  (genera  :  active,  middle,  passive),  three  tenses  (present, 
preterit,  future),  three  declensions  through  a,  i,  u.  As  there  is 
here  an  element  of  mysticism,  so  is  there  also  in  Grimm's  highfiown 

family  has  most  often  aspirates  where  Greek  has  tenues,  tenues  where  it 
has  media},  and  again  raediaa  where  it  has  aspirates,  e.g.  fod,  Gr.  pons  ;  horn, 
Gr.  keras  ;  ]>rir,  Gr.  treia  ;  padde,  Gr.  batrakhoa ;  kone,  Gr.  gune  ;  ti,  Gr.  deka ; 
bcerer,  Gr.  pherd  ;  galde,  Gr.  kholS  ;  dtfr,  Gr.  thura."  To  the  word  '  horn  '  was 
appended  a  foot-note  to  the  effect  that  h  without  doubt  here  originally  was 
the  German  c/t-sound.     This  was  one  year  before  Grimm  stated  his  law  ! 


§5]  THE    SOUND   SHIFT  45 

explanation  of  the  whole  process  from  pretended  popular  psy- 
chology, which  is  full  of  the  cloudiest  romanticism.  "  When 
once  the  language  had  made  the  first  step  and  had  rid  itself  of 
the  organic  basis  of  its  sounds,  it  was  hardly  possible  for  it  to 
escape  the  second  step  and  not  to  arrive  at  the  third  stage,^ 
through  which  this  development  was  perfected.  .  .  .  It  is  impossible 
not  to  admire  the  instinct  by  which  the  linguistic  spirit  (sprachgeist) 
carried  this  out  to  the  end.  A  great  many  sounds  got  out  of  joint, 
but  they  always  knew  how  to  arrange  themselves  in  a  different 
place  and  to  find  the  new  application  of  the  old  law.  I  am  not 
saying  that  the  shift  happened  without  any  detriment,  nay  from 
one  point  of  view  the  sound  shift  appears  to  me  as  a  barbarous 
aberration,  from  which  other  more  quiet  nations  abstained,  but 
which  is  connected  with  the  violent  progress  and  craving  for  freedom 
which  was  found  in  Germany  in  the  beginning  of  the  Middle  Ages 
and  which  initiated  the  transformation  of  Europe.  The  Germans 
pressed  forward  even  in  the  matter  of  the  innermost  sounds 
of  their  language,"  etc.,  with  remarks  on  intellectual  progress 
and  on  victorious  and  ruling  races.  Grimm  further  says  that 
"  die  diitte  stufe  des  verschobnen  lauts  den  kreislauf  abschliesse 
und  nach  ihr  ein  neuer  ansatz  zur  abweichimg  wieder  von  vorn 
anheben  miisse.  Doch  eben  weil  der  sprachgeist  seinen  lauf 
vollbracht  hat,  scheint  er  nicht  wieder  neu  beginnen  zu  wollen  " 
(GDS  1. 292  f.,  299).  It  would  be  difficult  to  attach  any  clear  ideas 
to  these  words. 

Grimm's  idea  of  a  *  kreislauf  '  is  caused  by  the  notion  that  the 
two  shifts,  separated  by  several  centuries,  represent  one  continued 
movement,  while  the  High  German  shift  of  the  eighth  century  has 
really  no  more  to  do  with  the  primitive  Gothonic  shift,  which  took 
place  probably  some  time  before  Christ,  than  has,  for  instance, 
the  Danish  shift  in  words  like  gribe,  bide,  bage,  from  gripce,  bitce, 
bakce  (about  1400),  or  the  still  more  recent  transition  in  Danish 
through  which  stressed  t  in  lid,  tyve,  etc.,  sounds  nearly  like  [ts],  as 
in  HG.  zeit.  There  cannot  possibly  be  any  causal  nexus  between 
such  transitions,  separated  chronologically  by  long  periods,  with 
just  as  little  change  in  the  pronunciation  of  these  consonants  as 
there  has  been  in  English.^ 

*  The  muddling  of  the  negatives  is  Grimm's,  not  the  translator's. 

■  I  am  therefore  surprised  to  find  that  in  a  recent  article  {Am.  Joum. 
of  Philol.  39.  415,  1918)  Collitz  praises  Grimm's  view  in  preference  to  Rask's 
because  he  saw  "  an  inherent  connexion  between  the  various  processes  of 
the  shifting,"  which  were  "  subdivisions  of  one  great  law  in  which  the  formula 
T  :  A  :  M  may  be  used  to  illustrate  the  shifting  (in  a  single  language)  of  three 
different  groups  of  consonants  and  the  result  of  a  double  or  threefold  shifting 
(in  three  difierent  languages)  of  a  single  group  of  consonants.  This  great 
law  was  unknown  to  Rask."  Collitz  recognizes  that  "  Grimm's  law  will 
hold  good  only  if  we  accept  the  term  *  aspirate '  in  the  broad  sense  in  which 


46     BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  ii 

Grimm  was  anj'thing  but  a  phonetician,  and  sometimes  says 
things  which  nowadays  cannot  but  produce  a  smile,  as  when  he 
says  (Gr  1.3)  "  in  our  word  schrifl,  for  instance,  we  express  eight 
sounds  through  seven  signs,  for/ stands  for  ph  "  ;  thus  he  earnestly 
beUeves  that  sch  contains  three  sounds,  a  and  the  '  aspirate  * 
ch=c-}-h  1  Yet  through  the  irony  of  fate  it  was  on  the  history  of 
sounds  that  Grimm  exercised  the  strongest  influence.  As  in  other 
parts  of  his  grammar,  so  also  in  the  "  theory  of  letters  "  he  gave 
fuller  word  lists  than  people  had  been  accustomed  to,  and  this 
opened  the  eyes  of  scholars  to  the  great  regularity  reigning  in  this 
department  of  linguistic  development.  Though  in  his  own  etj^mo- 
logical  practice  he  was  far  from  the  strict  idea  of  '  phonetic  law  ' 
that  played  such  a  prominent  role  in  later  times,  he  thus  paved  the 
way  for  it.  He  speaks  of  law  at  any  rate  in  connexion  with  the 
consonant  shift,  and  there  recognizes  that  it  serves  to  curb  wild 
etymologies  and  becomes  a  test  for  them  (Gesch  291).  The  con- 
sonant shift  thus  became  the  law  in  linguistics,  and  because  it 
affected  a  great  many  words  known  to  everybody,  and  in  a  new 
and  surprising  way  associated  well-known  Latin  or  Greek  words 
with  words  of  one's  owa  mother-tongue,  it  became  popularly  the 
keystone  of  a  new  wonderful  science. 

Grimm  coined  several  of  the  terms  now  generally  used  in  lin- 
guistics ;  thus  umlaut  and  ablaut,  '  strong  '  and  '  weak  '  declensions 
and  conjugations.  As  to  the  first,  we  have  seen  that  it  was  Rask 
who  first  understood  and  who  taught  Grimm  the  cause  of  this 
phenomenon,  which  in  English  has  often  been  designated  by 
the  German  term,  while  Sweet  calls  it '  mutation  '  and  others  better 
'  infection.'  With  regard  to  '  ablaut '  (Sweet :  gradation,  best 
perhaps  in  English  apophony),  Rask  termed  it  '  omlyd,'  a  word 
which  he  never  applied  to  Grimm's  '  umlaut,'  thus  keeping  the  two 
kinds  of  vowel  change  as  strictly  apart  as  Grimm  does.  Apophony 
was  first  discovered  in  that  class  of  verbs  which  Grimm  called 
'  strong  '  ;  he  was  fascinated  by  the  commutation  of  the  vowels 
in  springe,  sprang,  gesprungen,  and  sees  in  it,  as  in  birnbambum, 
something  mystic  and  admirable,  characteristic  of  the  old  German 
spirit.  He  was  thus  blind  to  the  correspondences  found  in  other 
languages,  and  his  theory  led  him  astray  in  the  second  volume,  in 
which  he  constructed  imaginary  verbal  roots  to  explain  apophony 
wherever  it  was  found  outside  the  verbs. 

it  is  employed  by  J.  Grimm  " — but  '  broad  '  here  means  '  wrong  '  or 
'  unscientific'  There  is  no  kreislauf  in  the  case  of  initial  k  =  h  ;  only  in 
a  few  of  the  nine  series  do  we  find  three  distinct  stages  (as  in  tres,  three,  drei)  ; 
here  we  have  in  Danish  three  stages,  of  which  the  third  is  a  reversal  to  the 
first  (tre) ;  in  E.  mother  we  have  five  stages  :  t,  p,  "5,  d,  (OE.  modor)  and  again 
5.  Is  there  an  "inherent  connexion  between  the  various  processes  of  this 
shifting  "  too  ? 


§5]  THE  SOUND    SHIFT  47 

Though  Grimm,  as  we  have  seen,  was  by  his  principles  and 
whole  tendency  averse  to  prescribing  laws  for  a  language,  he  is 
sometimes  carried  away  by  his  love  for  mediaeval  German,  as 
when  he  gives  as  the  correct  nominative  form  der  boge,  though 
everybody  for  centuries  had  said  der  bogen.  In  the  same  way 
many  of  his  followers  would  apply  the  historical  method  to  questions 
of  correctness  of  speech,  and  would  discard  the  forms  evolved  in 
later  times  in  favour  of  previously  existing  forms  which  were  looked 
upon  as  more  '  organic' 

It  will  not  be  necessary  here  to  speak  of  the  imposing  work 
done  by  Grimm  in  the  rest  of  his  long  life,  chiefly  spent  as  a  professor 
in  Berlin.  But  in  contrast  to  the  ordinary  view  I  must  say  that 
what  appears  to  me  as  most  likely  to  endure  is  his  work  on  syntax, 
contained  in  the  fourth  volume  of  his  grammar  and  in  monographs. 
Here  his  enormous  learning,  his  close  power  of  observation,  and 
his  historical  method  stand  him  in  good  stead,  and  there  is  much 
good  sense  and  freedom  from  that  kind  of  metaphysical  systematism 
which  was  triumphant  in  contemporaneous  work  on  classical  syntax. 
His  services  in  this  field  are  the  more  interesting  because  he  did 
not  himself  seem  to  set  much  store  by  these  studies  and  even 
said  that  syntax  was  half  outside  the  scope  of  grammar.  This 
utterance  belongs  to  a  later  period  than  that  of  the  birth  of  historical 
and  comparative  linguistics,  and  we  shall  have  to  revert  to  it  after 
sketching  the  work  of  the  third  great  founder  of  this  science,  to 
whom  we  shall  now  turn. 


n.— §  6.  Franz  Bopp. 

The  third,  by  some  accounted  the  greatest,  among  the  founders  of 
modern  linguistic  science  was  Franz  Bopp.  His  life  was  unevent- 
ful. At  the  age  of  twenty-one  (he  was  born  in  1791)  he  went  to  Paris 
to  study  Oriental  languages,  and  soon  concentrated  his  attention 
on  Sanskrit.  His  first  book,  from  which  it  is  customary  in  Germany 
to  date  the  birth  of  Comparative  Philology,  appeared  in  1816,  while 
he  was  still  in  Paris,  under  the  title  Ueber  des  conjugationssy stent  der  i.>^ 
sanskriisprache  in  vergleichung mit  jenem  dergriechischen,  lateinischen,  — 
persischen  mid  germanischen  sprache,  but  the  latter  part  of  the  small 
volume  was  taken  up  with  translations  from  Sanskrit,  and  for  a 
long  time  he  was  just  as  much  a  Sanskrit  scholar,  editing  and 
translating  Sanskiit  texts,  as  a  comparative  grammarian.  He 
showed  himself  in  the  latter  character  in  several  papers  read  before 
the  Berlin  Academy,  after  he  had  been  made  a  professor  there  in 
1822,  and  especially  in  his  famous  Vergleichende  grammatik  des 
Sanskrit,  liend,  armenischen,  griechischen,  lateinischen,  litauischen, 
altslawischeii,  gotischen  und  deutschen,  the  first  edition  of  which  was 


48    BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY    [ch.  ii 

published  between  1833  and  1849,  the  second  in  1857,  and  the 
third  in  1868.     Bopp  died  in  18G7. 

Of  Bopp's  Conjugationssystem  a  revised,  rearranged  and  greatly 
improved  English  translation  came  out  in  1820  under  the  title 
Analytical  Comparison  of  the  Sanskrit,  Greek,  Latin  and  Teutonic 
Languages.  This  was  reprinted  with  a  good  introduction  by 
F.  Techraer  in  his  Internationale  zeitschrift  fiir  allgem.  sprachwissen- 
schaft  IV  (1888),  and  in  the  following  remarks  I  shall  quote  this 
(abbreviated  AC)  instead  of,  or  alongside  of,  the  German  original 
(abbreviated  C). 

Bopp's  chief  aim  (and  in  this  he  was  characteristically  different 
from  Rask)  was  to  find  out  the  ultimate  origin  of  grammatical 
forms.  He  follows  his  quest  by  the  aid  of  Sanslo-it  forms,  though 
he  does  not  consider  these  as  the  ultimate  forms  themselves  :  "I 
do  not  believe  that  the  Greek,  Latin,  and  other  European  languages 
are  to  be  considered  as  derived  from  the  Sanskrit  in  the  state  in 
which  we  find  it  in  Indian  books  ;  I  feel  rather  inclined  to  consider 
them  altogether  as  subsequent  variations  of  one  original  tongue, 
which,  however,  the  Sanskrit  has  preserved  more  perfect  than  its 
kindred  dialects.  But  whilst  therefore  the  language  of  the  Brah- 
mans  more  frequently  enables  us  to  conjecture  the  primitive  form 
of  the  Greek  and  Latin  languages  than  what  we  discover  in  the 
oldest  authors  and  monuments,  the  latter  on  their  side  also  may 
not  unfrequently  elucidate  the  Sanskrit  grammar  "  (AC 3).  Herein 
subsequent  research  has  certainly  borne  out  Bopp's  view. 

After  finding  out  by  a  comparison  of  the  grammatical  forms 
of  Sanskrit,  Greek,  etc.,  which  of  these  forms  were  identical  and 
what  were  their  oldest  shapes,  he  tries  to  investigate  the  ultimate 
origin  of  these  forms.  This  he  takes  to  be  a  comparatively  easy 
consequence  of  the  first  task,  but  he  was  here  too  much  under  the 
influence  of  the  philosophical  grammar  then  in  vogue.  Gottfried 
Hermann  {De  emendanda  ratione  Grcecce  grmnmaticcB,  1801), 
on  purely  logical  grounds,  distinguishes  three  things  as  necessary 
elements  of  each  sentence,  the  subject,  the  predicate,  and  the  copula 
joining  the  first  two  elements  together  ;  as  the  power  of  the  verb 
is  to  attribute  the  predicate  to  the  subject,  there  is  really  only  one 
verb,  namely  the  verb  to  be.  Bopp's  teacher  in  Paris,  Silvestre 
de  Sacy,  says  the  same  thing,  and  Bopp  repeats  :  "  A  verb,  in  the 
most  restricted  meaning  of  the  term,  is  that  part  of  speech  by 
which  a  subject  is  connected  with  its  attribute.  According  to 
this  definition  it  would  appear  that  there  can  exist  only  one  verb, 
namely,  the  substantive  verb,  in  Latin  esse  ;  in  English,  to  be.  .  .  . 
Languages  of  a  structure  similar  to  that  of  the  Greek,  Latin,  etc., 
can  express  by  one  verb  of  this  kind  a  whole  logical  proposition,  in 
which,  however,  that  part  of  speech  which  expresses  the  connexion 


§6]  FRANZ  BOPP  49 

of  the  subject  with  its  attribute,  which  is  the  characteristic  function 
of  the  verb,  is  generally  entirely  omitted  or  understood.  The  Latin 
verb  dat  expresses  the  proposition  '  he  gives,'  or  '  he  is  giving '  : 
the  letter  t,  indicating  the  third  person,  is  the  subject,  da  expresses 
the  attribute  of  giving,  and  the  grammatical  copula  is  understood. 
In  the  verb  potest,  the  latter  is  expressed,  and  potest  unites  in  itself 
the  three  essential  parts  of  speech,  t  being  the  subject,  es  the  copula, 
and  pot  the  attribute." 

Starting  from  this  logical  conception  of  grammar,  Bopp  is 
inclined  to  find  everywhere  the  '  substantive  verb  '  to  be  in  its 
two  Sanski'it  forms  as  and  bhu  as  an  integral  part  of  verbal  forms. 
He  is  not  the  fii-st  to  think  that  terminations,  which  are  now  in- 
separable parts  of  a  verb,  were  originally  independent  words ;  thus 
Home  Tooke  (in  Epea  pteroenta,  1786,  ii.  429)  expressly  says  that 
"  All  those  common  terminations  in  any  language  .  .  .  are  them- 
selves separate  words  with  distinct  meanings,"  and  explains,  for 
instance,  Latin  ibo  from  i,  '  go'  -\-  b,  '  will,'  from  Greek  boul- 
(oTnai)  +  0  '  /,'  from  ego.  Bopp's  explanations  are  similar  to  this, 
though  they  do  not  imply  such  violent  shortenings  as  that  of  botil- 
{omai)  to  6.  He  finds  the  root  Sanski'it  as,  '  to  be,'  in  Latin  perfects 
like  scrip-s-i,  in  Greek  aorists  like  e-tup-s-a  and  in  futures  like  tup-s-o. 
That  the  same  addition  thus  indicates  different  tenses  does  not 
trouble  Bopp  greatly  ;  he  explains  hsLt.fueram  iromfu  -\-  es  -\-  am, 
etc.,  and  says  that  the  root  fii  "  contains,  properly,  nothing  to  indi- 
cate past  time,  but  the  usage  of  language  having  supplied  the  want 
of  an  adequate  inflexion,  fui  received  the  sense  of  a  perfect,  and 
fu-eram,  which  would  be  nothing  more  than  an  imperfect,  that 
of  a  pluperfect,  and  after  the  same  manner  fu-ero  signifies  *  I  shall 
have  been,'  instead  of  '  I  shall  be  '  "  (AC  57).  All  Latin  verbal 
endings  containing  r  are  thus  explained  as  being  ultimately  formed 
■with  the  substantive  verb  {ama-rem,  etc.) ;  thus  among  others  the 
infinitives  fac-ere,  ed-ere,  as  well  as  esse,  posse :  "  £"  is  properly,  in 
Latin,  the  termination  of  a  simple  infinitive  active  ;  and  the  root 
Es  produced  anciently  ese,  by  adding  e ;  the  s  having  afterwards 
been  doubled,  we  have  esse.  This  termination  e  answers  to  the 
Greek  infinitive  in  ai,  etnai  ..."  (AC  58). 

If  Bopp  found  a  master-key  to  many  of  the  verbal  endings 
in  the  Sanskrit  root  es,  he  found  a  key  to  many  others  in  the  other 
root  of  the  verb  '  to  be,'  Sanskrit  bhu.  He  finds  it  in  the  Latin 
imperfect  da-bam,  as  well  as  in  the  future  da-bo,  the  relation  between 
which  is  the  same  as  that  between  er-a7n  and  er-o.  "  Bo,  bis,  bit 
has  a  striking  similarity  with  the  Anglo-Saxon  beo,  bys,  byth,  the 
future  tense  of  the  verb  substantive,  a  similarity  which  cannot  be 
considered  as  merely  accidental."  [Here  neither  the  form  nor  the 
function    of    the    Anglo-Saxon   la   stated    quite    co^rectl3^]    But 

4 


50    BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  n 

the  ending  in  Latin  ama-vi  is  also  referred  to  the  same  root ;  for 
the  change  of  the  b  into  v  we  arc  referred  to  Italian  amava,  from 
Lat.  amabam ;  thus  also  fui  is  for  fuvi  and  potui  is  for  pot-vi : 
"  languages  manifest  a  constant  effort  to  combine  heterogeneous 
materials  in  such  a  manner  as  to  offer  to  the  ear  or  eye  one 
perfect  whole,  like  a  statue  executed  by  a  skilful  artist,  that 
wears  the  appearance  of  a  figure  hewn  out  of  one  piece  of 
marble  "  (AC  60). 

The  following  may  be  taken  as  a  fair  specimen  of  the  method 
followed  in  these  first  attempts  to  account  for  the  origin  of  flexional 
forms  :  "  The  Latin  passive  forms  amat-ur,  amant-ury  would,  in 
some  measure,  conform  to  this  mode  of  joining  the  verb  substantive, 
if  the  r  was  also  the  result  of  a  permutation  of  an  original  8  ;  and 
this  appears  not  quite  incredible,  if  we  compare  the  second  person 
ama-ris  with  the  third  amat-ur.  Either  in  one  or  the  other  there 
must  be  a  transposition  of  letters,  to  which  the  Latin  language 
is  particularly  addicted.  If  ama-ris,  which  might  have  been 
produced  from  atna-sis,  has  preserved  the  original  order  of  letters, 
then  ama-tur  must  be  the  transposition  of  ama-rui  or  ama-sut, 
and  ama-ntur  that  of  ama-runt  or  ama-sunt.  If  this  be  the  case, 
the  origin  of  the  Latin  passive  can  be  accounted  for,  and  although 
differing  from  that  of  the  Sanskrit,  Greek,  and  Gothic  languages,  it 
is  not  produced  by  the  invention  of  a  new  grammatical  form. 
It  becomes  clear,  also,  why  many  verbs,  with  a  passive  form,  have 
an  active  signification  ;  because  there  is  no  reason  why  the  addi- 
tion of  the  verb  substantive  should  necessarily  produce  a  passive 
sense.  There  is  another  way  of  explaining  ama-ris,  if  it  really 
stands  for  ama-sis  ;  the  s  may  be  the  radical  consonant  of  the 
reflex  pronoun  se.  The  introduction  of  this  pronoun  would  be 
particularly  adapted  to  form  the  middle  voice,  which  expresses 
the  reflexion  of  the  action  upon  the  actor  ;  but  the  Greek  language 
exemplifies  the  facility  with  which  the  peculiar  signification  of 
the  middle  voice  passes  into  that  of  the  passive."  The  reasoning 
in  the  beginning  of  this  passage  (the  only  one  contained  in  C) 
carries  us  back  to  a  pre-scientific  atmosphere,  of  which  there  are 
few  or  no  traces  in  Rask's  writings  ;  the  latter  explanation  (added 
in  AC)  was  preferred  by  Bopp  himself  in  later  works,  and  v/as  for 
many  years  accepted  as  the  correct  one,  until  scholars  found  a 
passive  in  r  in  Keltic,  where  the  transition  from  s  to  r  is  not  found 
as  it  is  in  Latin  ;  and  as  the  closely  corresponding  forms  in  Keltic 
and  Italic  must  obviously  be  explained  in  the  same  way,  the  hypo- 
thesis of  a  composition  with  se  was  generally  abandoned.  Bopp's 
partiality  for  the  abstract  verb  is  seen  clearly  when  he  explains 
the  Icelandic  passive  in  -st  from  s  —  es  (C  132) ;  here  llask  and 
Gx'imm  saw  the  correct  and  obvious  explanation. 


§6]  FRANZ  BOPP  51 

Among  the  other  explanations  given  first  by  Bopp  must  be 
mentioned  the  Latin  second  person  of  the  passive  voice  -mini,  as 
in  ama-mini,  which  he  takes  to  be  the  nominative  mascuhne  plural 
of  a  participle  corresponding  to  Greek  -me7ios  and  found  in  a  different 
form  in  Lat.  alumnus  (AC  51).  This  explanation  is  still  widely 
accepted,  though  not  by  everybody. 

With  regard  to  the  preterit  of  what  Grimm  was  later  to  term 
the  '  weak '  verbs,  Bopp  vacillates  between  different  explanations. 
In  C  118  he  thinks  the  t  ov  d  is  identical  with  the  ending  of  the 
participle,  in  which  the  case  endings  were  omitted  and  supplanted 
by  personal  endings  ;  the  syllable  cd  after  d  [in  Gothic  sok-id-edum  ; 
'  Greek,'  p.  119,  must  be  a  misprint  for  Gothic]  is  nothing  but  an 
accidental  addition.  But  on  p.  151  he  sees  in  sokidedun,  sokidedi, 
a  connexion  of  sok  with  the  preterit  of  the  verb  Tun,  as  if  the  Ger- 
mans were  to  say  sucheiaten,  suchetdte  ;  he  compares  the  English  use 
of  did  {did  seek),  and  thinks  the  verb  used  is  G.  tun,  Goth,  tanjan. 
The  theory  of  composition  is  here  restricted  to  those  forms  that 
contain  two  d's,  i.e.  the  plural  indicative  and  the  subjunctive.  In 
the  English  edition  this  twofold  explanation  is  repeated  with 
some  additions  :  d  or  t  as  in  Gothic  sok-i-da  and  oh-ta  originates 
from  a  participle  found  in  Sanskr.  tyak-ta,  likh-i-ta,  Lat.  -tus,  Gr. 
-tds  ;  this  suffix  generally  has  a  passive  sense,  but  in  neuter  verbs 
an  active  sense,  and  therefore  would  naturally  serve  to  form  a 
preterit  tense  with  an  active  signification.  He  finds  a  proof  of 
the  connexion  between  this  preterit  and  the  participle  in  the  fact 
that  onlj'  such  verbs  as  have  this  ending  in  the  participle  form 
their  preterit  by  means  of  a  dental,  while  the  others  (the  '  strong  ' 
verbs,  as  Grimm  afterwards  termed  them)  have  a  participle  in  an 
and  reduplication  or  a  change  of  vowel  in  the  preterit ;  and  Bopp 
compares  the  Greek  aorist  passive  etuphth-en,  eddth-en,  which  he 
conceives  may  proceed  from  the  participle  tuphth-els,  doth-eis 
(AC  37  ff.).  This  suggestion  seems  to  have  been  commonly  over- 
looked or  abandoned,  while  the  other  explanation,  from  dedi  as 
in  English  did  seek,  which  Bopp  gives  p.  49  for  the  subjunctive  and 
the  indicative  plural,  was  accepted  by  Grimm  as  the  explanation  of  all 
the  forms,  even  of  those  containing  only  one  dental ;  in  later  works 
Bopp  agreed  with^  Grimm  and  thus  gave  up  the  first  part  of  his 
original  explanation.  The  did  explanation  had  been  given  already 
by  D.  von  Stade  (d.  1718,  see  Collitz,  Das  schicache  prdtcritum, 
p.  1) ;  Rask  (P  270,  not  mentioned  by  Collitz)  says  :  "  Whence 
this  d  or  t  has  come  is  not  easy  to  tell,  as  it  is  not  found  in  Latin  and 
Greek,  but  as  it  is  evident  from  the  Icelandic  grammar  that  it  is 
closely  connected  with  the  past  participle  and  is  also  found  in 
the  preterit  subjunctive,  it  seems  clear  that  it  must  have  been  an 
old  characteristic  of  the  past  tense  in  every  mood,  but  was  lost 


52    BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  ii 

in  Greek  when  the  above-mentioned  participles  in  tos  disappeared 
from  the  verbs  "  (cf.  Ch.  XIX  §  12). 

With  regard  to  the  vowels,  Bopp  in  AC  has  the  interesting 
theory  that  it  is  only  through  a  defect  in  the  alphabet  that  Sanskrit 
appears  to  have  a  in  so  many  places  ;  he  believes  that  the  spoken 
language  had  often  "  the  short  Italian  e  and  o,"  where  a  was 
written.  "If  this  was  the  case,  we  can  give  a  reason  why,  in  words 
common  to  the  Sanskrit  and  Greek,  the  Indian  akdra  [that  is, 
short  a]  so  often  corresponds  to  e  and  o,  as,  for  instance,  asti,  he 
is,  ecTTL ;  patis,  husband,  Troat? ;  amharas,  sky,  ofi^po^,  rain, 
etc."  Later,  unfortunately,  Bopp  came  under  the  influence  of 
Grimm,  who,  as  we  saw,  on  speculative  grounds  admitted  in  the 
primitive  language  only  the  three  vowels  a,  i,  u,  and  Bopp  and 
his  followers  went  on  believing  that  the  Sanskrit  a  represented  the 
original  state  of  language,  until  the  discovery  of  the  '  palatal  law  ' 
(about  1880)  showed  (what  Bopp's  occasional  remark  might  other- 
wise easily  have  led  up  to,  if  he  had  not  himself  discarded  it)  that 
the  Greek  tripartition  into  a,  e,  o  represented  really  %  more  original 
state  of  things. 

II.— §7.  Bopp  continued. 

In  a  chapter  on  the  rootS  in  AC  (not  found  in  C),  Bopp  contrasts 
the  structure  of  Semitic  roots  and  of  our  own  ;  in  Semitic  languages 
roots  must  consist  of  three  letters,  neither  more  nor  less,  and  thus 
generally  contain  two  syllables,  while  in  Sanskrit,  Greek,  etc., 
the  character  of  the  root  "  is  not  to  be  determined  by  the  number 
of  letters,  but  by  that  of  the  syllables,  of  which  they  contain  only 
one  "  ;  thus  a  root  like  i,  '  to  go,'  would  be  unthinkable  in  Arabic. 
The  consequence  of  this  structure  of  the  roots  is  that  the  inner 
changes  which  play  such  a  large  part  in  expressing  grammatical 
modifications  in  Semitic  languages  must  be  much  more  restricted 
in  our  family  of  languages.  These  changes  were  what  F.  Schlegel 
termed  flexions  and  what  Bopp  himself,  two  years  before  (C  7), 
had  named  "  the  truly  organic  way  "  of  expressing  relation  and 
mentioned  as  a  wonderful  flexibility  foimd  in  an  extraordinary 
degree  in  Sanskrit,  by  the  side  of  which  composition  with  the 
verb  '  to  be  '  is  found  only  occasionally.  Now,  however,  in  1820, 
Bopp  repudiates  Schlegel's  and  his  own  previous  assumption  that 
'  flexion '  was  characteristic  of  Sanslcrit  in  contradistinction  to 
other  languages  in  which  grammatical  modifications  were  expressed 
by  the  addition  of  suffixes.  On  the  contrary,  while  holding  that 
both  methods  are  emploj'ed  in  all  languages,  Chinese  perhaps  alone 
excepted,  he  now  thinks  that  it  is  the  suffix  method  which  is  preva- 
lent in  Sanskrit,  and  that  "  the  only  real  inflexions  .  .  .  possible 


§7]  FRANZ  BOPP  58 

in  a  language,  whose  elements  are  monosj-llables,  are  the  change 
of  their  vowels  and  the  repetition  of  their  radical  consonants, 
otherwise  called  reduplication."  It  will  be  seen  that  Bopp  here 
avoids  both  the  onesidedness  found  in  Schlegel's  division  of 
languages  and  the  other  onesidedness  which  we  shall  encounter 
in  later  theories,  according  to  which  all  grammatical  elements  are 
originally  independent  subordinate  roots  added  to  the  main  root. 

In  his  Vocalismus  (1827,  reprinted  1836)  Bopp  opposes  Grimm's 
theory  that  the  changes  for  which  Grimm  had  introduced  the  term 
ablaut  were  due  to  psychological  causes  ;  in  other  words,  possessed 
an  inner  meaning  from  the  very  outset.  Bopp  inclined  to  a 
mechanical  explanation  ^  and  thought  them  dependent  on  the 
weight  of  the  endings,  as  shown  by  the  contrast  between  Sanskr. 
veda,  Goth,  vait,  Gr.  otda  and  the  plural,  respectively  vidima,  vitum, 
idmen.  In  this  instance  Bopp  is  in  closer  agreement  than  Grimm 
with  the  majority  of  younger  scholars,  who  see  in  apophony 
(ablaut)  an  originally  non-significant  change  brought  about 
mechanically  by  phonetic  conditions,  though  they  do  not  find 
these  in  the  '  weight  '  of  the  ending,  but  in  the  primeval  accent ; 
the  accentuation  of  Sanskrit  was  not  known  to  Bopp  when  he 
wrote  his  essay. 

The  personal  endings  of  the  verbs  had  already  been  identified 
with  the  corresponding  pronouns  by  Scheidius  (1790)  and  Rask 
(P  258)  ;  Bopp  adopts  the  same  view,  only  reproaching  Scheidius 
for  thinking  exclusively  of  the  nominative  forms  of  the  pronouns. 

It  thus. appears  that  in  his  early  work  Bopp  deals  with  a  great 
many  general  problems,  but  his  treatment  is  suggestive  rather  than 
exhaustive  or  decisive,  for  there  are  too  many  errors  in  details 
and  his  whole  method  is  open  to  serious  criticism.  A  modern 
reader  is  astonished  to  see  the  facility  with  which  violent  changes 
of  sounds,  omissions  and  transpositions  of  consonants,  etc.,  are 
gratuitously  accepted.  Bopp  never  reflected  as  deeply  as  Rask 
did  on  what  constitutes  linguistic  kinship,  hence  in  C  he  accepts 
the  common  belief  that  Persian  was  related  more  closely  to  German 
than  to  Sanskrit,  and  in  later  life  he  tried  to  establish  a  relationship 
between  the  Malayo-Polynesian  and  the  Indo-European  languages. 
But  in  spite  of  all  this  it  must  be  recognized  that  in  his  long  laborious 
life  he  accomplished  an  enormous  amount  of  highly  meritorious 
work,  not  only  in  Sanskrit  philology,  but  also  in  comparative 
grammar,  in  which  he  graduall}'^  freed  himself  of  his  worst  methodi- 
cal errors.  He  was  constantly  widening  his  range  of  vision,  taking 
into  consideration  more  and  more  cognate  languages.  The  ingenious 
way  in  which  he  explained  the  curious  Keltic  shiftings  in  initial 

^  Probably  vuider  the  influence  of  Humboldt,  who  wrote  to  him  (Sep- 
*»mber  1826) :  "  Absichtlicb  grammatisch  ist  gewiss  kein  vokalwechael." 


54    BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  ii 

consonants  (which  had  so  puzzled  Rask  as  to  make  him  doubt  of 
a  connexion  of  these  languages  with  our  family,  but  which  Bopp 
showed  to  be  dependent  on  a  lost  final  sound  of  the  preceding  word) 
definitely  and  irrefutably  established  the  position  of  those  languages. 
Among  other  things  that  might  be  credited  to  his  genius,  I  shall 
select  his  explanation  of  the  various  declensional  classes  as  deter- 
mined by  the  final  sound  of  the  stem.  But  it  is  not  part  of  my 
plan  to  go  into  many  details  ;  suffice  it  to  say  that  Bopp's  great 
Vergleichemle  grammatik  served  for  long  years  as  the  best,  or  really 
the  only,  exposition  of  the  new  science,  and  vastly  contributed  not 
only  to  elucidate  obscure  points,  but  also  to  make  comparative 
grammar  as  popular  as  it  is  possible  for  such  a  necessarily 
abstruse  science  to  be. 

In  Bopp's  Vergleichende  grammatik  (1.  §  108)  he  gives  his  classifi- 
cation of  languages  in  general.  He  rejects  Fr.  Schlegel's  bipartition. 
but  his  growing  tendency  to  explain  everything  in  Aryan  grammar, 
even  the  inner  changes  of  Sanskrit  roots,  by  mechanical  causes 
makes  him  modify  A.  W.  Schlegel's  tripartition  and  place  our 
family  of  languages  with  the  second  instead  of  the  third  class. 
His  three  classes  are  therefore  as  follows  :  I.  Languages  without 
roots  proper  and  without  the  power  of  composition,  and  thus  with- 
out organism  or  grammar  ;  to  this  class  belongs  Chinese,  in  which 
most  grammatical  relations  are  only  to  be  recognized  by  the  posi- 
tion of  the  words.  II.  Languages  with  monosyllabic  roots,  capable 
of  composition  and  acquiring  their  organism,  their  grammar, 
nearly  exclusively  in  this  way  ;  the  main  principle  of  word  forma- 
tion is  the  connexion  of  verbal  and  pronominal  roots.  To  this 
class  belong  the  Indo-European  languages,  but  also  all  languages 
not  comprised  under  the  first  or  the  third  class.  III.  Languages 
with  disyllabic  roots  and  three  necessary  consonants  as  sole  bearers 
of  thB  signification  of  the  word.  This  class  includes  only  the 
Semitic  languages.  Grammatical  forms  are  here  created  not  only 
by  means  of  composition,  as  in  the  second  class,  but  also  by  inner 
modification  of  the  roots. 

It  will  be  seen  that  Bopp  here  expressly  avoids  both  expressions 
'agglutination'  and  '  flexion,'  the  former  because  it  had  been  used 
of  languages  contrasted  with  Aryan,  while  Bopp  wanted  to  show 
the  essential  identity  of  the  two  classes  ;  the  latter  because  it  had 
been  invested  with  much  obscurity  on  account  of  Fr.  Schlegel's 
use  of  it  to  signify  inner  modification  only.  According  to  Schlegel, 
only  such  instances  as  English  drink  /  drank  /  drunk  are  pure 
flexion,  while  German  trink-c  /  trank  /  ge-trunk-en,  and  still  more 
Greek  leip-o  I  e-lip-on  /  le-loip-a,  besides  an  element  of  '  flexion  ' 
contain  also  affixed  elements.  It  is  clear  that  no  language  can  use 
'  flexion  '  (in  Schlegel's  sense)  exclusively,  and  consequently  this 


§7]  FRANZ  BOPP  55 

cannot  be  made  a  principle  on  which  to  erect  a  classification  of 
languages  generally.  Schlegcl's  use  of  the  term  '  flexion  '  seems 
to  have  been  dropped  by  all  subsequent  writers,  who  use  it  so  as 
to  include  what  is  actually  found  in  the  grammar  of  such  languages 
as  Sanskrit  and  Greek,  comprising  under  it  inner  and  outer  modi- 
fications, but  of  course  not  requiring  both  in  the  same  form. 

In  view  of  the  later  development  of  our  science,  it  is  worthy 
of  notice  that  neither  in  the  brothers  Schlegel  nor  in  Bopp  do  we 
yet  meet  with  the  idea  that  the  classes  set  up  are  not  onlj'  a  dis- 
tribution of  the  languages  found  side  by  side  in  the  world  at  this 
time,  but  also  represent  so -many  stages  in  historical  development ; 
indeed,  Bopp's  definitions  are  framed  so  as  positively  to  exclude 
any  development  from  his  Class  II  to  Class  III,  as  the  character 
of  the  underlying  roots  is  quite  heterogeneous.  On  the  other  hand, 
Bopp's  tendency  to  explain  Aryan  endings  from  originally  inde- 
pendent roots  paved  the  way  for  the  theorj^  of  isolation,  agglutina- 
tion and  flexion  as  three  successive  stages  of  the  same  language. 

In  his  first  work  (C  56)  Bopp  had  already  hinted  that  in  the 
earliest  period  known  to  us  languages  had  already  outlived  their 
most  perfect  state  and  were  in  a  process  of  decaj^ ;  and  in  his 
review  of  Grimm  (1827)  he  repeats  this  :  "  We  perceive  them  in 
a  condition  in  which  they  may  indeed  be  progressive  syntactically, 
but  have,  as  far  as  grammar  is  concerned,  lost  more  or  less  of 
what  belonged  to  the  perfect  structure,  in  which  the  separate 
members  stand  in  exact  relation  to  each  other  and  in  which  every- 
thing derived  has  still  a  visible  and  unimpaired  connexion  with 
its  source  "  (Voc.  2),  We  shall  see  kindred  ideas  in  Humboldt 
and  Schleicher. 

To  sum  up  :  Bopp  set  about  discovering  the  ultimate  origin 
of  flexional  elements,  but  instead  of  that  he  discovered  Compara- 
tive Grammai' — "  a  pen  pres  comme  Christophe  Colomb  a  decouvert 
TAmerique  en  cherchant  la  route  des  Indes,"  as  A.  Meillet  puts 
it  (LI  413).  A  countryman  of  Rask  may  be  forgiven  for  pushing 
the  French  scholar's  brilliant  comparison  still  further  :  in  the 
same  way  as  Norsemen  from  Iceland  had  discovered  America 
before  Columbus,  without  imagining  that  they  w^ere  finding  the 
way  to  India,  just  so  Rasmus  Rask  through  his  Icelandic  studies 
had  discovered  Comparative  Grammar  before  Bopp,  ^^■ithout 
needing  to  take  the  circuitous  route  through  Sanskrit. 

n.— §  8.  Wilhelm  von  Humboldt. 

This  will  be  the  proper  place  to  mention  one  of  the  profoundest 
thinkers  in  the  domain  of  linguistics,  Wilhelm  von  Humboldt 
(1767-1835),  who,  while  playing  an  important  part  in  the  political 


5Q    BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY    [ch.  ii 

world,  found  time  to  study  a  great  many  languages  and  to 
think  deeply  on  many  problems  connected  with  philology  and 
ethnography.^ 

In  numerous  works,  the  most  important  of  which,  Ueber  die 
Kawisprache  auf  der  Insel  Jaiua,  with  the  famous  introduction 
'■  Ueber  die  Verschiedenheit  des  menschlichen  Sprachbaues  und 
ihren  Einfluss  auf  die  geistige  Entwickelung  des  Menschen- 
geschlechts,"  was  published  posthumously  in  1836-40,  Hum- 
boldt developed  his  linguistic  philosoph}',  of  which  it  is  not 
easy  to  give  a  succinct  idea,  as  it  is  largely  couched  in  a 
most  abstruse  style  ;  it  is  not  surprising  that  his  admirer  and 
follower,  Heymarm  Steinthal,  in  a  series  of  books,  gave  as  many 
different  interpretations  of  Humboldt's  thoughts,  each  purporting 
to  be  more  correct  than  its  predecessors.  Still,  I  believe  the 
following  may  be  found  to  be  a  tolerably  fair  rendering  of  some 
of  Humboldt's  ideas. 

He  rightly  insists  on  the  importance  of  seeing  in  language 
a  continued  activity.  Language  is  not  a  substance  or  a  finished 
work,  but  action  (Sie  selbst  ist  kein  werk,  ergon,  sondern  eine 
tatigkeit,  energeia).  Language  therefore  cannot  be  defined  except 
genetically.  It  is  the  ever-repeated  labour  of  the  mind  to  utilize 
articulated  sounds  to  express  thoughts.  Strictly  speaking,  this 
is  a  definition  of  each  separate  act  of  speech  ;  but  truly  and  essen- 
tially a  language  must  be  looked  upon  as  the  totality  of  such  acts. 

*  Humboldt'a  relation  to  Bopp'e  general  ideas  is  worth  studying;  see 
his  letters  to  Bopp,  printed  as  Nachtrag  to  S.  Lefman's  Franz  Bopp,  sein 
leben  und  seine  wissenschaft  (Berlin,  1897),  He  is  (p.  5)  on  the  whole  of 
Bopp's  opinion  that  flexions  have  arisen  through  agglutination  of  syllables, 
the  independent  meaning  of  which  was  lost  ;  still,  he  is  not  certain  that  all 
flexion  can  be  explained  in  that  way,  and  especially  doubts  it  in  the  case 
of  '  umlaut,'  under  which  term  he  here  certainly  includes  '  ablaut,'  as 
seen  by  his  reference  (p.  12)  to  Greek  future  staid  from  stello  ;  he  adds  that 
"  some  flexions  are  at  the  same  time  so  insignificant  and  so  widely  spread 
in  languages  that  I  should  be  inclined  to  call  them  original ;  for  example, 
our  i  of  the  dative  and  m  of  the  same  case,  both  of  which  by  their  sharper 
soimd  seem  intended  to  call  attention  to  the  peculiar  nature  of  this  case, 
which  does  not,  like  the  other  cases,  denote  a  simple,  but  a  double  relation" 
(repeated  p.  10).  Humboldt  doubts  Bopp's  identification  of  the  temporal 
augment  with  the  a  privativum.  He  says  (p.  14)  that  cases  often  originate 
from  prepositions,  as  in  American  languages  and  in  Basque,  and  that  he  has 
always  explained  our  genitive,  as  in  G.  7nanne-s,  as  a  remnant  of  aua.  This 
is  evidently  wrong,  as  the  a  of  aus  is  a  special  High  German  development 
from  t,  while  the  s  of  the  genitive  is  also  found  in  languages  which  do  not 
share  in  this  development  of  t.  But  the  remark  is  interesting  because,  apart 
from  the  historical  proof  to  the  contrary  which  we  happen  to  possess  in  this 
case,  the  derivation  is  no  whit  worse  than  many  of  the  explanations  resorted 
to  by  adherents  of  the  agglutinative  theory.  But  Humboldt  goes  on  to  say 
that  in  Greek  and  Latin  he  is  not  prepared  to  maintain  that  one  single 
case  is  to  be  explained  in  this  way.  Humboldt  probably  had  some  influence 
on  Bopp's  view  of  the  weak  pretei-it,  for  he  is  skeptical  with  regard  to  the  did 
explanation  and  inclines  to  connect  the  ending  with  the  participle  in  t. 


§8]  WILHELM   VON  HUMBOLDT  57 

For  the  words  and  rules,  which  according  to  our  ordinary  notions 
make  up  a  language,  exist  really  only  in  the  act  of  connected  speech. 
The  breaking  up  of  language  into  words  and  rules  is  nothing  but 
a  dead  product  of  our  bungling  scientific  analysis  (Versch  41). 
Nothing  in  language  is  static,  everything  is  djTiamic.  Language 
has  nowhere  any  abiding  place,  not  even  in  writing  ;  its  dead  part 
must  continually  be  re-created  in  the  mind  ;  in  order  to  exist 
it  must  be  spoken  or  understood,  and  so  pass  in  its  entirety  into 
the  subject  (ib.  63). 

Humboldt  speaks  continually  of  languages  as  more  perfect  or 
less  perfect.  Yet  "  no  language  should  be  condemned  or  depre- 
ciated, not  even  that  of  the  most  savage  tribe,  for  each  language 
is  a  picture  of  the  original  aptitude  for  language  "  (Versch  304). 
In  another  place  he  speaks  about  special  excellencies  even  of  lan- 
guages that  cannot  in  themselves  be  recognized  as  superlatively 
good  instruments  of  thought.  Undoubtedly  Chinese  of  the  old 
style  carries  with  it  an  impressive  dignity  through  the  immediate 
succession  of  nothing  but  momentous  notions  ;  it  acquires  a  simple 
greatness  because  it  throws  away  all  unnecessary  accessory  elements 
and  thus,  as  it  were,  takes  flight  to  pure  thinking.  Malay  is  rightly 
praised  for  its  ease  and  the  great  simplicity  of  its  constructions. 
The  Semitic  languages  retain  an  admirable  art  in  the  nice  discrimina- 
tion of  sense  assigned  to  many  shades  of  vowels.  Basque  possesses 
a  particular  vigour,  dependent  on  the  briefness  and  boldness  of 
expression  imparted  by  the  structure  of  its  words  and  by  their 
combination.  Delaware  and  other  American  languages  express 
in  one  word  a  number  of  ideas  for  which  we  should  require  many 
words.  The  human  mind  is  always  capable  of  producing  something 
admirable,  however  one-sided  it  may  be  ;  such  special  points  decide 
nothing  with  regard  to  the  rank  of  languages  (Versch  189  f.).  We 
have  here,  as  indeed  continually  in  Humboldt,  a  valuation  of  lan- 
guages with  many  brilliant  remarks,  but  on  the  whole  we  miss  the 
concrete  details  abounding  in  Jenisch's  work.  Humboldt,  as  it 
were,  lifts  us  to  a  higher  plane,  where  the  air  may  be  purer,  but 
where  it  is  also  thinner  and  not  seldom  cloudier  as  well. 

According  to  Humboldt,  each  separate  language,  even  the  most 
despised  dialect,  should  be  looked  upon  as  an  organic  whole,  different 
from  all  the  rest  and  expressing  the  individuality  of  the  people 
speaking  it ;  it  is  characteristic  of  one  nation's  psyche,  and  indi- 
cates the  peculiar  way  in  which  that  nation  attempts  to  realize 
the  ideal  of  speech.  As  a  language  is  thus  symbolic  of  the  national 
character  of  those  who  speak  it,  very  much  in  each  language  had 
its  origin  in  a  symbolic  representation  of  the  notion  it  stands  for  ; 
there  is  a  natural  nexus  between  certain  sounds  and  certain  general 
ideas,  and  consequently  we  often  find  similar  sounds  used  for  the 


58     BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [cii.  ii 

same,  or  nearly  the  same,  idea  in  languages  not  otherwise  related 
to  one  another. 

Humboldt  is  opposed  to  the  idea  of  '  general '  or  '  universal ' 
grammar  as  understood  in  his  time  ;  instead  of  this  purely  deduc- 
tive grammar  he  would  found  an  inductive  general  grammar, 
based  upon  the  comparison  of  the  different  ways  in  which  the  same 
grammatical  notion  was  actually  expressed  in  a  variety  of  lan- 
guages. He  set  the  example  in  his  paper  on  the  Dual.  His  own 
studies  covered  a  variety  of  languages  ;  but  his  works  do  not  give 
us  many  actual  concrete  facts  from  the  languages  he  had  studied  ; 
he  was  more  interested  in  abstract  reasonings  on  language  in  general 
than  in  details. 

In  an  important  paper,  Ueber  das  Enlstelien  der  grammatischen 
Formen  uml  ihren  Einfluss  auf  die,  Ideenentwickelung  (1822),  he  says 
that  language  at  first  denotes  only  objects,  leaving  it  to  the  hearer 
to  understand  or  guess  at  (hinzudenken)  their  connexion.  By 
and  by  the  word-order  becomes  fixed,  and  some  words  lose  their 
independent  use  and  sound,  so  that  in  the  second  stage  we  see 
grammatical  relations  denoted  through  word-order  and  through 
words  vacillating  between  material  and  formal  significations. 
Gradually  these  become  affixes,  but  the  connexion  is  not  yet  firm, 
the  joints  are  still  visible,  the  result  being  an  aggregate,  not  yet  a 
unit.  Thus  in  the  third  stage  we  have  something  analogous  to 
form,  but  not  real  form.  This  is  achieved  in  the  fourth  stage, 
where  the  word  is  one,  only  modified  in  its  grammatical  relations 
through  the  flexional  sound  ;  each  word  belongs  to  one  definite 
part  of  speech,  and  form-words  have  no  longer  any  disturbing 
material  signification,  but  are  pure  expressions  of  relation.  Such 
words  as  Lat.  amavit  and  Greek  epoiesas  are  truly  grammatical 
forms  in  contradistinction  to  such  combinations  of  words  and  sylla- 
bles as  are  found  in  cruder  languages,  because  we  have  here  a  fusion 
into  one  whole,  which  causes  the  signification  of  the  parts  to  be 
forgotten  and  joins  them  firmly  under  one  accent.  Though  Hum- 
boldt thus  thinks  flexion  developed  out  of  agglutination,  he  dis- 
tinctly repudiates  the  idea  of  a  gradual  development  and  rather 
inclines  to  something  like  a  sudden  crystallization  (see  especially 
Steinthal's  ed.,  p.  585). 

Humboldt's  position  with  regard  to  the  classification  of  lan- 
guages is  interesting.  In  his  works  we  continually  meet  with  the 
terms  agglutination  ^  and  flexion  by  the  side  of  a  new  term,  '  in- 
corporation.' This  he  finds  in  full  bloom  in  man}'  American  lan- 
guages, such  as  Mexican,  where  the  object  ma}'  be  inserted  into 
the  verbal  form  between  the  element  indicating  person  and  the 

»  Humboldt  seems  to  be  the  inventor  of  this  term  (1821;  see  Streitberg, 
IF  35.  191). 


§8]  WILHELM   VON   HUMBOLDT  59 

root.  Now,  Humboldt  says  that  besides  Chinese,  which  has  no 
grammatical  form,  there  are  three  possible  forms  of  languages, 
the  flexional,  the  agglutinative  and  the  incorporating,  but  he  adds 
that  all  languages  contain  one  or  more  of  these  forms  (Versch  301). 
He  tends  to  deny  the  existence  of  any  exclusively  agglutinative 
or  exclusively  flexional  language,  as  the  two  principles  are  gener- 
ally commingled  (132).  Flexion  is  the  only  method  that  gives 
to  the  word  the  true  inner  firmness  and  at  the  same  time  distributes 
the  parts  of  the  sentence  according  to  the  necessary  interlacing 
of  thoughts,  and  thus  undoubtedly  represents  the  pure  principle 
of  linguistic  structure.  Now,  the  question  is,  what  language  carries 
out  this  method  in  the  most  consistent  way  ?  True  perfection 
may  not  be  found  in  any  one  language  :  in  the  Semitic  languages 
we  find  flexion  in  its  most  genuine  shape,  united  with  the  most 
refined  symbolism,  only  it  is  not  pursued  consistently  in  all  parts 
of  the  language,  but  restricted  by  more  or  less  accidental  laws. 
On  the  other  hand,  in  the  Sanskritic  languages  the  compact  unity 
of  every  word  saves  flexion  from  any  suspicion  of  agglutination  ; 
it  pervades  all  parts  of  the  language  and  rules  it  in  the  highest 
freedom  (Versch  188).  Compared  with  incorporation  and  with 
the  method  of  loose  juxtaposition  without  any  real  word-unity, 
flexion  appears  as  an  intuitive  principle  born  of  true  linguistic 
genius  (ib.).  Between  Sanskrit  and  Chinese,  as  the  two  opposed 
jDoles  of  linguistic  structure,  each  of  them  perfect  in  the  consistent 
following  one  principle,  we  may  place  all  the  remaining  languages 
(ib.  326).  But  the  languages  called  agglutinative  have  nothing 
in  common  except  just  the  negative  trait  that  they  are  neither 
isolating  nor  flexional.  The  structural  diversities  of  human  lan- 
guages are  so  great  that  they  make  one  despair  of  a  fully  com- 
prehensive classification  (ib.  330). 

According  to  Humboldt,  language  is  in  continued  development 
under  the  influence  of  the  changing  mental  power  of  its  speakers. 
In  this  development  there  are  naturally  two  definite  periods,  one 
in  which  the  creative  instinct  of  speech  is  still  growing  and  active, 
and  another  in  which  a  seeming  stagnation  begins  and  then  an 
appreciable  decline  of  that  creative  instinct.  Still,  the  period  of 
decline  may  initiate  new  principles  of  life  and  new  successful 
changes  in  a  language  (Versch  184).  In  the  form-creating  period 
nations  are  occupied  more  with  the  language  than  with  its  purpose, 
i.e.  with  what  it  is  meant  to  signify.  They  struggle  to  express 
thought,  and  this  craving  in  connexion  with  the  inspiring  feeling 
of  success  produces  and  sustains  the  creative  power  of  language 
(ib.  191).  In  the  second  period  we  witness  a  wearing-off  of  the 
flexional  forms.  This  is  found  less  in  languages  reputed  crude  or 
rough  than  in  refined  ones.     Language  is  exposed  to  the  most 


60    BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY    [ch.  ii 

violent  changes  when  the  human  mind  is  most  active,  for  then 
it  considers  too  careful  an  observation  of  the  modifications  of 
sound  as  superfluous.  To  this  may  be  added  a  want  of  perception 
of  the  poetic  charm  inherent  in  the  sound.  Thus  it  is  the  transi- 
tion from  a  more  sensuous  to  a  more  intellectual  mood  that  works 
changes  in  a  language.  In  other  cases  less  noble  causes  are  at 
work.  Rougher  organs  and  less  sensitive  ears  are  productive 
of  indifference  to  the  principle  of  harmony,  and  finally  a  prevalent 
practical  trend  may  bring  about  abbreviations  and  omissions  of 
all  kinds  in  its  contempt  for  everything  that  is  not  strictly  neces- 
sary for  the  purpose  of  being  understood.  While  in  the  first  period 
the  elements  still  recall  their  origin  to  man's  consciousness,  there 
is  an  aesthetic  pleasure  in  developing  the  instrument  of  mental 
activity  ;  but  in  the  second  period  language  serves  only  the  prac- 
tical needs  of  life.  In  this  way  such  a  language  as  English  may 
reduce  its  forms  so  as  to  resemble  the  structure  of  Chinese  ;  but 
there  will  always  remain  traces  of  the  old  flexions  ;  and  English 
is  no  more  incapable  of  high  excellences  than  German  (Versch 
282-6).     What  these  are  Humboldt,  however,  does  not  tell  us. 

n. — §9.  Grimm  Once  More. 

Humboldt  here  foreshadowed  and  probably  influenced  ideas 
to  which  Jacob  Grimm  gave  expression  in  two  essays  written  in 
his  old  age  and  which  it  will  be  necessary  here  to  touch  upon. 
In  the  essay  on  the  pedantry  of  the  German  language  {Ueber  das 
pedantische  in  der  deutschen  sprache,  1847),  Grimm  says  that  he 
has  so  often  praised  his  mother-tongue  that  he  has  acquired  the 
right  once  in  a  while  to  blame  it.  If  pedantry  had  not  existed 
already,  Germans  would  have  invented  it ;  it  is  the  shadowy  side 
of  one  of  their  virtues,  painstaking  accuracy  and  loyalty.  Grimm's 
essay  is  an  attempt  at  estimating  a  language,  but  on  the  whole  it 
is  less  comprehensive  and  less  deep  than  that  of  Jenisch.  Grimm 
finds  fault  with  such  things  as  the  ceremoniousness  with  which 
princes  are  spoken  to  and  spoken  of  {Durchlauchtigster,  allerhochst- 
derselbe),  and  the  use  of  the  pronoun  Sie  in  the  third  person  plural 
in  addi-essing  a  single  person  ;  he  speaks  of  the  clumsiness  of  the 
auxiliaries  for  the  passive,  the  past  and  the  future,  and  of  the 
word-order  which  makes  the  Frenchman  cry  impatiently  "  J 'attends 
le  verbe."  He  blames  the  use  of  capitals  for  substantives  and  other 
peculiarities  of  German  spelling,  but  gives  no  general  statement 
of  the  principles  on  which  the  comparative  valuation  of  different 
languages  should  be  based,  though  in  many  passages  we  see  that 
he  places  the  old  stages  of  the  language  very  much  higher  than 
the  language  of  his  own  day. 


§9]  GRIMM   ONCE  MORE  61 

The  essay  on  the  origin  of  language  (1851)  is  much  more 
important,  and  may  be  said  to  contain  the  mature  expression  of 
all  Grimm's  thoughts  on  the  philosophy  of  language.  Unfor- 
tunately, much  of  it  is  couched  in  that  high-flown  poetical  style 
which  may  be  partly  a  consequence  of  Grimm's  having  approached 
the  exact  study  of  language  through  the  less  exact  studies  of  popular 
poetry  and  folklore  ;  this  style  is  not  conducive  to  clear  ideas,  and 
therefore  renders  the  task  of  the  reporter  very  difficult  indeed. 
Grimm  at  some  length  argues  against  the  possibility  of  language 
having  been  either  created  by  God  when  he  created  man  or  having 
been  revealed  by  God  to  man  after  his  creation.    The  very  imper-  \^ 

fections  and  changeability  of  language  speak  against  its  divine  wc-  " 
origin.  Language  as  gradually  developed  must  be  the  work  ol{\iJ\^ 
man  himself,  and  therein  is  different  from  the  immutable  cries 
and  songs  of  the  lower  creation.  Nature  and  natural  instinct 
have  no  history,  but  mankind  has.  Man  and  woman  were  created 
as  grown-up  and  marriageable  beings,  and  there  must  have  been 
created  at  once  more  than  one  couple,  for  if  there  had  been  only 
one  couple,  there  would  have  been  the  possibility  that  the  one 
mother  had  borne  only  sons  or  only  daughters,  further  procreation 
being  thus  rendered  impossible  (!),  not  to  mention  the  moral  objec- 
tions to  marriages  between  brother  and  sister.  How  these  once 
created  beings,  human  in  every  respect  except  in  language,  were 
able  to  begin  talking  and  to  find  themselves  understood,  Grimm 
does  not  really  tell  us  ;  he  uses  such  expressions  as  '  inventors  ' 
of  words,  but  apart  from  the  symbolical  value  of  some  sounds, 
such  as  I  and  r,  he  thinks  that  the  connexion  of  word  and  sense 
was  quite  arbitrary.  On  the  other  hand,  he  can  tell  us  a  great 
deal  about  the  first  stage  of  human  speech  :  it  contained  only  the 
three  vowels  a,  i,  u,  and  only  few  consonant  groups  ;  every  word 
was  a  monosjdlable,  and  abstract  notions  were  at  first  absent. 
The  existence  in  all  (?)  old  languages  of  masculine  and  feminine 
flexions  must  be  due  to  the  influence  of  women  on  the  formation 
of  language.  Through  the  distinction  of  genders  Grimm  says  that 
regularity  and  clearness  were  suddenly  brought  about  in  every- 
thing concerning  the  noun  as  by  a  most  happy  stroke  of  fortune. 
Endings  to  indicate  person,  number,  tense  and  mood  originated 
in  added  pronouns  and  auxiliary  words,  which  at  first  were  loosely 
joined  to  the  root,  but  later  coalesced  with  it.  Besides,  redupli- 
cation was  used  to  indicate  the  past ;  and  after  the  absorption  of 
the  reduplicational  syllable  the  same  effect  was  obtained  in  German 
through  apophony.  All  nouns  presuppose  verbs,  whose  material 
sense  was  applied  to  the  designation  of  things,  as  when  G.  hahn 
('  cock  ')  was  thus  called  from  an  extinct  verb  hanan,  corresponding 
to  Lat.  canere,  '  to  sing.' 


62    BEGINNING  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  n 

In  what  Grimm  says  about  the  development  of  language  it  is 
easy  to  trace  the  influence  of  Humboldt's  ideas,  though  they  are 
worked   out   with   great   originality.     He   discerns   three   stages, 
the  last  two  alone  being  accessible  to  us  through  historical  docu- 
ments.   In  the  first  period  we  have  the  creation  and  growing  of 
roots  and  words,  in  the  second  the  flourishing  of  a  perfect  flexion, 
and  in  the  third  a  tendency  to  thoughts,  which  leads  to  the  giving 
up  of  flexion  as  not  yet  (?)  satisfactory.     The}'  may  be  compared 
to  leaf,  blossom  and  fruit,  "  the  beauty  of  human  speech  did  not 
bloom  in  its  beginning,  but  in  its  middle  period  ;    its  ripest  fruits 
will  not  be  gathered  till  some  time  in  the  future."     He  thus  sums 
up  his  theory  of  the  three  stages  ;   "  Language  in  its  earliest  form 
was  melodious,  but  diffuse  and  straggling  ;    in  its  middle  form  it 
was  full  of  intense  poetical  vigour  ;  in  our  own  days  it  seeks  to 
remedy  the  diminution  of  beauty  by  the  harmony  of  the  whole,  and 
is  more  effective  though  it  has  inferior  means."    In  most  places 
Grimm  still  speaks  of  the  downward  course  of  linguistic  develop- 
ment ;  all  the  oldest  languages  of  our  family  "  show  a  rich,  pleasant 
and  admirable  perfection  of  form,  in  which  all  material  and  spiritual 
elements  have  vividly  interpenetrated  each  other,"  Mhile  in  the 
later  developments  of  the  same  languages  the  inner  jiower  and 
subtlety  of  flexion  has  generally  been  given  up  and  destroj'ed, 
though  partly  replaced  by  external  means  and  auxiliary  words. 
On  the  whole,  then,  the  history  of  language  discloses  a  descent 
from  a  period  of  perfection  to  a  less  perfect  condition.     This  is 
the  point  of  view  that  we  meet  with  in  nearly  all  linguists  ;    but 
there  is  a  new  note  when  Grimm  begins  vaguely  and  dimly  to  see 
that  the  loss  of  flexional  forms  is  sometimes  compensated  by  other 
things  that  may  be  equally  valuable  or  even  more  valuable  ;   and 
he  even,  without  elaborate  arguments,  contradicts  his  own  main 
contention  when  he  says  that  "  human  language  is  retrogressive 
only  apparently  and  in  particular  points,  but  looked  upon  as  a 
whole  it  is  progressive,  and  its  intrinsic  force  is  contmually  in- 
creasing."   He  instances  the  English  language,  which  by  sheer 
making  havoc  of  all'  old  phonetic  laws  and  by  the  loss  of  all  flexions 
has  acquired  a  great  force  and  power,  such  as  is  found  perhaps 
in  no  other  human    language.     Its  wonderfully  happy  structure 
resulted  from  the  marriage  of  the  two  noblest  languages  of  Europe  ; 
therefore  it  was  a  fit  vehicle  for  the  greatest  poet  of  modern  times, 
and  may  justly  claim  the  right  to  be  called  a  world's  language  ; 
like  the  English  people,  it  seems  destined  to  reign  in  future  even 
more  than  now  in  all  parts  of  the  earth.     This  enthusiastic  panegyric 
forms  a  striking  contrast  to  what  the  next  great  German  scholar  with 
whom  we  have  to  deal,  Schleicher,  says  about  the  same  language, 
which  to  him  shows  only  "  how  rapidl}'^  the  language  of  a  nation 
important  both  in  history  and  literature  can  decline"  (II.  231). 


CHAPTER   III 
MIDDLE   OF  NINETEENTH   CENTURY 

S  1.  After  Bopp  and  Grimm.  §  2.  K,  M.  Rapp.  §  3.  J.  H.  Bredsdorff. 
§  4.  August  Schleicher.  §  5.  Classification  of  Languages.  §  6.  Recon- 
struction. §  7.  Curtius,  Madvig  and  Specialists.  §  8.  Max  Miiller  and 
Whitney. 

III. — §  1.  After  Bopp  and  Grimm. 

Bopp  and  Grimm  exercised  an  enormous  influence  on  linguistic 
thought  and  linguistic  research  in  Germany  and  other  countries. 
Long  even  before  their  death  we  see  a  host  of  successors  following 
in  the  main  the  lines  laid  down  in  their  work,  and  thus  directly 
and  indirectly  they  determined  the  development  of  this  science 
for  a  long  time.  Through  their  efforts  so  much  new  light  had 
been  shed  on  a  number  of  linguistic  phenomena  that  these  took 
a  quite  different  aspect  from  that  which  they  had  presented  to  the 
previous  generation  ;  most  of  what  had  been  written  about  etymo- 
logy and  kindred  subjects  in  the  eighteenth  century  seemed  to  the 
new  school  utterly  antiquated,  mere  fanciful  vagaries  of  incom- 
petent blunderers,  whereas  now  scholars  had  found  firm  ground 
on  which  to  raise  a  magnificent  structure  of  solid  science.  This 
feeling  was  especially  due  to  the  undoubted  recognition  of  one 
great  famiiy  of  languages  to  which  the  vast  majority  of  European 
languages,  as  well  as  some  of  the  most  important  Asiatic  languages, 
belonged  :  here  we  had  one  firmly  established  fact  of  the  greatest 
magnitude,  which  at  once  put  an  end  to  all  the  earlier  whimsical 
attempts  to  connect  Latin  and  Greek  words  with  Hebrew  roots. 
As  for  the  name  of  that  family  of  languages,  Rask  hesitated  between 
different  names,  '  European,'  '  Sarmatic  '  and  finally  '  Japhetic  ' 
(as  a  counterpart  of  the  Semitic  and  the  Hamitic  languages)  ; 
Bopp  at  first  had  no  comprehensive  name,  and  on  the  title-page 
of  his  Vergl.  grammatik  contents  himself  with  enumerating  the 
chief  languages  described,  but  in  the  work  itself  he  says  that  he 
prefers  the  name  '  Indo-European,'  which  has  also  found  wide 
acceptance,  though  more  in  France,  England  and  Skandinavia 
than  in  Germany.  Humboldt  for  a  long  while  said  '  Sanskritic, 
but  later  he  adopted  '  Indo-Germanic,'  and  this  has  been  the  gener 
ally  recognized  name  used  in  Germany,  in  spite  of  Bopp's  protest 
who  said  that '  Indo-klassisch  '  would  be  more  to  the  point ;  '  Indo- 

63 


64        MIDDLE  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  iii 

Keltic  '  has  also  been  proposed  as  designating  the  family  through 
its  two  extreme  members  to  the  East  and  West.  But  all  these 
compound  names  are  clumsy  without  being  completely  pertinent, 
and  it  seems  therefore  much  better  to  use  the  short  and  con- 
venient term  '  the  Aryan  languages  ' :  Aryan  being  the  oldest 
name  bj'  which  any  members  of  the  family  designated  themselves 
(in  India  and  Persia).^ 

Thanks  to  the  labours  of  Bopp  and  Grimm  and  their  co-workers 
and  followers,  we  see  also  a  change  in  the  status  of  the  study  of 
languages.  Formerly  this  was  chiefly  a  handmaiden  to  philology 
— but  as  this  word  is  often  in  English  used  in  a  sense  unknown 
to  other  languages  and  really  objectionable,  namely  as  a  synonym 
of  (comparative)  study  of  languages,  it  will  be  necessary  first  to 
say  a  few  words  about  the  terminology  of  our  science.  In  this 
book  I  shall  use  the  word  '  philology  '  in  its  continental  sense,  which 
is  often  rendered  in  English  by  the  vague  word  '  scholarship,' 
meaning  thereby  the  study  of  the  specific  culture  of  one  nation  ; 
thus  we  speak  of  Latin  philology,  Greek  philolog}',  Icelandic 
philology,  etc.  The  word  'linguist,'  on  the  other  hand, is  not  infre- 
quently used  in  the  sense  of  one  who  has  merely  a  practical  know- 
ledge of  some  foreign  language  ;  but  I  think  I  am  in  accordance 
with  a  growing  number  of  scholars  in  England  and  America  if  I 
call  such  a  man  a  '  practical  Imguist '  and  apply  the  word '  linguist  * 
by  itself  to  the  scientific  student  of  language  (or  of  languages)  ; 
'  linguistics  '  then  becomes  a  shorter  and  more  convenient  name 
for  what  is  also  called  the  science  of  language  (or  of  languages). 

Now  that  the  reader  understands  the  sense  in  which  I  take 
these  two  terms,  I  may  go  on  to  say  that  the  beginning  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  witnessed  a  growing  differentiation  between  philo- 
logy and  linguistics  in  consequence  of  the  new  method  introduced 
by  comj)arative  and  by  historical  grammar  ;  it  was  nothing  less 
than  a  completely  new  way  of  looking  at  the  facts  of  language 
and  trying  to  trace  their  origin.  While  to  the  philologist  the 
Greek  or  Latin  language,  etc.,  was  only  a  means  to  an  end,  to  the 
linguist  it  was  an  end  in  itself.  The  former  saw  in  it  a  valuable, 
and  in  fact  an  indispensable,  means  of  gaining  a  first-hand  know- 
ledge of  the  literature  which  was  his  chief  concern,  but  the  linguist 
cared  not  for  the  literature  as  such,  but  studied  languages  for  their 
own  sake,  and  might  even  turn  to  languages  destitute  of  literature 
because  they  were  able  to  throw  some  light  on  the  life  of  language 
in  general  or  on  forms  in  related  languages.  The  philologist  as 
such  would  not  think  of  studying  the  Gothic  of  Wulfila,  as  a  know- 

^  It  has  been  objected  to  the  use  of  Arj'^an  in  this  wide  sense  that  the 
name  is  also  vised  in  the  restricted  sense  of  Indian  +  Iranic  ;  but  no  separate 
name  is  needed  for  that  small  group  other  than  Indo-Iranio. 


§1]  AFTER  BOPP  AND   GRIMM  65 

ledge  of  that  language  gives  access  only  to  a  translation  of  parts 
of  the  Bible,  the  ideas  of  which  can  be  studied  much  better  else- 
where ;  but  to  the  linguist  Gothic  was  extremely  valuable.  The 
differentiation,  of  course,  is  not  an  absolute  one  ;  besides  being 
linguists  in  the  new  sense,  Rask  was  an  Icelandic  philologist, 
Bopp  a  Sanskrit  philologist,  and  Grimm  a  German  philologist ; 
but  the  tendency  towards  the  emancipation  of  linguistics  was  very 
strong  in  them,  and  some  of  their  pupils  were  pure  linguists  and 
did  no  work  in  philology. 

In  breaking  away  from  philology  and  claiming  for  linguistics 
the  rank  of  a  new  and  independent  science,  the  partisans  of  the 
new  doctrine  were  apt  to  think  that  not  only  had  they  discovered 
a  new  method,  but  that  the  object  of  their  study  was  different 
from  that  of  the  philologists,  even  when  they  were  both  concerned 
with  language.  While  the  philologist  looked  upon  language  as 
part  of  the  culture  of  some  nation,  the  linguist  looked  upon  it  as 
a  natural  object ;  and  when  in  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury philosophers  began  to  divide  all  sciences  into  the  two  sharply 
separated  classes  of  mental  and  natural  sciences  (geistes-  und 
naturwissenschaften),  linguists  would  often  reckon  their  science 
among  the  latter..  There  was  in  this  a  certain  amount  of  pride 
or  boastfulness,  for  on  account  of  the  rapid  rise  and  splendid 
achievements  of  the  natm-al  sciences  at  that  time,  it  began  to  be  a 
matter  of  common  belief  that  they  were  superior  to,  and  were  pos- 
sessed of  a  more  scientific  method  than,  the  other  class — the  same 
view  that  fhids  an  expression  in  the  ordinary  English  usage, 
according  to  which  '  science '  means  natural  science  and  the 
other  domains  of  human  knowledge  are  termed  the  '  arts  '  or  the 
'  humanities.' 

We  see  the  new  point  of  view  in  occasional  utterances  of  the 
pioneers  of  linguistic  science.  Rask  expressly  says  that  "  Language 
is  a  natural  object  and  its  study  resembles  natural  history " 
(SA  2.  502)  ;  but  when  he  repeats  the  same  sentence  (in  Retskrivn- 
ingslcere,  8)  it  appears  that  he  is  thinking  of  language  as  opposed 
to  the  more  artificial  writing,  and  the  contrast  is  not  between 
mental  and  natural  science,  but  between  art  and  nature,  between 
what  can  and  what  cannot  be  consciously  modified  by  man — ^it  is 
really  a  different  question. 

Bopp,  in  his  review  of  Grimm  (1827,  reprinted  Vocalismus, 
1836,  p.  1),  says  :  "  Languages  are  to  be  considered  organic  natural 
bodies,  which  are  formed  according  to  fixed  laws,  develop  as  pos- 
sessing an  inner  principle  of  life,  and  gradually  die  out  because 
they  do  not  understand  themselves  any  longer  [!],  and  therefore 
cast  off  or  mutilate  their  members  or  forms,  which  were  at  first 
significant,  but  gradually  have  become  more  of  an  extrinsip  mass. 

5 


66        MIDDLE   OF  NINETEENTH   CENTURY     [ch.  in 

...  It  is  not  possible  to  determine  how  long  languages  may  pre- 
serve their  full  vigour  of  life  and  of  procreation,"  etc.  This  is 
highly  figurative  language  which  should  not  be  taken  at  its  face 
value  ;  but  expressions  like  these,  and  the  constant  use  of  such 
words  as  '  organic  '  and  '  inorganic  '  in  speaking  of  formations  in 
languages,  and  '  organism  '  of  the  whole  language,  would  tend  to 
widen  the  gulf  between  the  philological  and  the  linguistic  point  of 
view.  BojDp  himself  never  consistently  followed  the  naturalistic 
w'ay  of  looking  at  language,  but  in  §  4  of  this  chapter  we  shall  see 
that  Schleicher  was  not  afraid  of  going  to  extremes  and  building 
up  a  consistent  natural  science  of  language. 

The  cleavage  between  philology  and  linguistics  did  not  take 
^lace  without  arousing  warm  feeling.  Classical  scholars  disliked 
the  intrusion  of  Sanskrit  everywhere  ;  they  did  not  know  that 
language  and  did  not  see  the  use  of  it.  They  resented  the  way 
in  which  the  new  science  wanted  to  reconstruct  Latin  and  Greek 
grammar  and  to  substitute  new  explanations  for  those  which 
had  always  been  accepted.  Those  Sanskritists  chatted  of  guna 
and  vrddhi  and  other  barbaric  terms,  and  even  ventured  to  talk 
of  a  locative  case  in  Latin,  as  if  the  number  of  cases  had  not  been 
settled  once  for  all  long  ago  !  ^ 

Classicists  were  no  doubt  perfectly  right  when  they  reproached 
comparativists  for  their  neglect  of  s^mtax,  which  to  them  was  the 
most  important  part  of  grammar  ;  they  were  also  in  some  measure 
right  when  they  maintained  that  linguists  to  a  great  extent  con- 
tented themselves  with  a  superficial  knowledge  of  the  languages 
compared,  which  they  studied  more  in  grammars  and  glossaries 
than  in  living  texts,  and  sometimes  they  would  even  exult  when 
they  found  proof  of  this  in  solecisms  in  Bopp's  Latin  translations 
from  Sanskrit,  and  even  on  the  title-page  of  Glossarium  Sanscritum 
a  Franzisco  Bopj^.  Classical  scholars  also  looked  askance  at  the 
growing  interest  in  the  changes  of  sounds,  or,  as  it  was  then  usual 
to  say,  of  letters.  But  when  they  were  ajDt  here  to  quote  the  scrip- 
tural phrase  about  the  letter  that  killeth,  while  the  spirit  giveth 
life,  they  overlooked  the  fact  that  Nature  has  rendered  it  impos- 
sible for  anyone  to  penetrate  to  the  mind  of  am^one  else  except 
through  its  outer  manifestations,  and  that  it  is  consequently 
impossible  to  get  at  the  spirit  of  a  language  excej^t  through  its 
sounds  :  phonology  must  therefore  form  the  necessary  basis  and 
prerequisite  of  the  scientific  study  of  any  group  of  languages. 
Still,  it  cannot  be  denied  that  sometimes  comparative  phonology 
was  treated  in  such  a  mechanical  way  as  partly  to  dehumanize  the 
study  of  language. 

1  In  Lefmann's  book  ou  Bopp.pp.  292  and  299,there  are  some  interesting 
quotations  on  this  point. 


§1]  AFTER   BOPP   AND   GRIMM  67 

When  we  look  back  at  this  period  in  the  history  of  linguistics, 
there  are  certain  tendencies  and  characteristics  that  cannot  fail 
to  catch  our  attention.     First  we  must  mention  the  prominence 
given  to  Sanskrit,  which  was  thought  to  be  the  unavoidable  re- 
quirement of  every  comparative  linguist.     In  explaining  anything 
in  anj'  of  the  cognate  languages  the  etymologist  always  turned 
first  to  Sanskrit  words  and  Sanskrit  forms.     This  standpoint  is 
found   even  much  later,  for  instance  in  Max  Miiller's  Inaugural 
Address  (1868,  Ch.  19)  :    "  Sanskrit  certainly  forms  the  only  sound 
foundation  of  Comparative  Philology,  and  it  will  always  remain 
the  only  safe  guide  through  all  its  intricacies.     A  comparative 
philologist  without  a  knowledge  of  Sanskrit  is  like  an  astronomer 
without   a  knoAvledge   of  mathematics."    A   linguist  of   a   later 
generation  may  be  excused  for  agreeing  rather  with  Ellis,  who  says 
[Transact.  Philol.  Soc,   1873-4,  21)  :   "  Almost  in  our  own  days 
came  the  discovery  of  Sanskrit,  and  philology  proper  began — but, 
alas  !  at  the  wTong  end.     Now,  here  I  run  great  danger  of  being 
misunderstood.     Although  for   a  scientific   sifting  of  the  nature 
of  language  I  presume  to  think  that  beginning  at  Sanskrit  was 
unfortunate,  yet  I  freely  admit  that,  had  that  language  not  been 
brought  into  Europe  .  .  .  our  knowledge  of  language  would  have 
been  in  a  poor  condition  indeed.  .  .  .  We  are  under  the  greatest 
obligations  to  those  distinguished  men  who  have  undertaken   to 
unravel  its  secrets  and  to  show  its  connexion  with  the  languages 
of   Europe.     Yet  I    must  repeat  that  for  the  pure  science    of 
language,  to  begin  with  Sanskrit  was  as  much  beginning  at  the 
wrong  end    as  it   would   have   been    to  commence  zoology  with 
palseontology — the  relations  of  life  with  the  bones  of  the  dead." 

Next,  Bopp  and  his  nearest  successors  were  chiefly  occupied 
with  finding  likenesses  between  the  languages  treated  and  dis- 
covering things  that  united  them.  This  was  quite  natural  in  the 
first  stage  of  the  new  science,  but  sometimes  led  to  one-sidedness, 
the  characteristic  individuality  of  each  language  being  lost  sight 
of,  while  forms  from  many  countries  and  many  times  were  mixed 
up  in  a  hotch-potch.  Rask,  on  account  of  his  whole  mental  equip- 
ment, was  less  liable  to  this  danger  than  most  of  his  contemporaries  ; 
but  Pott  was  evidently  right  when  he  warned  his  fellow-students 
that  their  comparative  linguistics  should  be  supplemented  by 
separative  luiguistics  {ZdhlmetJiode,  229),  as  it  has  been  to  a  great 
extent  in  recent  years. 

Still  another  feature  of  the  linguistic  science  of  those  days 
is  the  almost  exclusive  occupation  of  the  student  with  dead 
languages.  It  was  quite  natural  that  the  earliest  comparativists 
should  first  give  their  attention  to  the  oldest  stages  of  the  languages 
compared,  since  these  alone  enabled  them  to  prove  the  essential 


68        MIDDLE  OF   NINETEENTH   CENTURY    [ch.  iii 

kinship  between  the  different  members  of  the  great  Aryan  family. 
In  Grimm's  grammar  nearlj'  all  the  space  is  taken  up  with  Gothic, 
Old  High  German,  Old  Norse,  etc.,  and  comparatively  little  is  said 
about  recent  developments  of  the  same  languages.  In  Bopp's 
comparative  grammar  classical  Greek  and  Latin  are,  of  course, 
treated  carefully,  but  Modern  Greek  and  the  Romanic  languages 
are  not  mentioned  (thus  also  in  Schleicher's  Compendhim  and  in 
Brugmann's  Grammar),  such  later  developments  being  left  to 
specialists  who  were  more  or  less  considered  to  be  outside  the  sphere 
of  Comparative  Linguistics  and  even  of  the  science  of  language 
in  general,  though  it  would  have  been  a  much  more  correct  view 
to  include  them  in  both,  and  though  much  more  could  really  be 
learnt  of  the  life  of  language  from  these  studies  than  from  com- 
parisons made  in  the  spirit  of  Bopp. 

The  earlier  stages  of  different  languages,  which  were  compared 
by  linguists,  Avere,  of  course,  accessible  only  through  the  medium 
of  writing  ;  we  have  seen  that  the  early  linguists  spoke  constantly 
of  letters  and  not  of  sounds.  But  this  vitiated  their  whole  outlook 
on  languages.  These  were  scarcely  ever  studied  at  first-hand, 
and  neither  in  Bopp  nor  in  Grimm  nor  in  Pott  or  Benfey  do  we  find 
such  first-hand  observations  of  living  spoken  languages  as  play  a 
great  role  in  the  writings  of  Rask  and  impart  an  atmosphere  of 
soundness  to  his  whole  manner  of  looking  at  languages.  If 
languages  were  called  natural  objects,  they  were  not  yet  studied 
as  such  or  by  truly  naturalistic  methods. 

When  living  dialects  were  studied,  the  interest  constantly 
centred  round  the  archaic  traits  in  them  ;  every  survival  of  an  old 
form,  every  trace  of  old  sounds  that  had  been  dropped  in  the 
standard  speech,  was  greeted  with  enthusiasm,  and  the  significance 
of  these  old  characteristics  greatly  exaggerated,  the  general  im- 
pression being  that  popular  dialects  were  always  much  more  con- 
servative than  the  speech  of  educated  people.  It  was  reserved 
for  a  much  later  time  to  prove  that  this  view  is  completely 
erroneous,  and  that  popular  dialects,  in  spite  of  many  archaic 
details,  are  on  the  whole  further  developed  than  the  various 
standard  languages  with  their  stronger  tradition  and  literary 
reminiscences. 


m.— §2.  K.  M.  Rapp. 

It  was  from  this  archasological  point  of  view  only  that  Grimm 
encouraged  the  study  of  dialects,  but  he  expressly  advised  students 
not  to  carry  the  research  too  far  in  the  direction  of  discriminating 
minutiae  of  sounds,  because  these  had  little  bearing  on  the  history 
of  language   as    he  understood  it.    In  this  connexion  we  may 


§2]  K.  M.   RAPP  69 

mention  an  episode  in  the  history  of  early  linguistics  that  is  sympto- 
matic. K.  M.  Rapp  brought  out  his  Versuch  einer  Physiologic 
der  Sprache  nebst  historischer  Entwickelung  der  ahendldndischen 
Idiome  nach  physiologischen  Grundsdtzen  in  four  volumes  (1836, 
1839,  1840,  1841).  A  physiological  examination  into  the  nature 
and  classification  of  speech  sounds  was  to  serve  only  as  the  basis 
of  the  historical  part,  the  grandiose  plan  of  which  was  to  find  out 
how  Greek,  Latin  and  Gothic  sounded,  and  then  to  pursue  the 
destinies  of  these  sound  systems  through  the  Middle  Ages  (Byzan- 
tine Greek,  Old  Provencal,  Old  French,  Old  Norse,  Anglo-Saxon,  Old 
High  German)  to  the  present  time  (Modern  Greek,  Italian,  Spanish, 
etc.,  down  to  Low  and  High  German,  with  different  dialects). 
To  carry  out  this  plan  Rapp  was  equipped  with  no  small  knowledge 
of  the  earlier  stages  of  these  languages  and  a  not  contemptible 
first-hand  observation  of  living  languages.  He  relates  how  from 
his  childhood  he  had  a  "  morbidly  sharpened  ear  for  all  acoustic 
impressions "  ;  he  had  early  observed  the  difference  between 
dialectal  and  educated  speech  and  taken  an  interest  in  foreign 
languages,  such  as  French,  Italian  and  English.  He  visited  Den- 
mark, and  there  made  the  acquaintance  of  and  became  the  pupil 
of  Rask ;  he  often  speaks  of  him  and  his  works  in  terms  of  the 
greatest  admiration.  After  his  return  he  took  up  the  study  of 
Jacob  Grimm  ;  but  though  he  speaks  always  very  warmly  about 
the  other  parts  of  Grimm's  work,  Grimm's  phonology  disappointed 
him.  "  Grimm's  theory  of  letters  I  devoured  with  a  ravenous 
appetite  for  all  the  new  things  I  had  to  learn  from  it,  but  also  with 
heartburning  on  account  of  the  equally  numerous  things  that 
warred  against  the  whole  of  my  previous  research  with  regard  to 
the  nature  of  speech  sounds  ;  fascinated  though  I  was  by  what 
I  read,  it  thus  made  me  incredibly  miserable."  He  set  to  his 
great  task  with  enthusiasm,  led  by  the  conviction  that  "  the  his- 
torical material  gives  here  only  one  side  of  the  truth,  and  that  the 
living  language  in  all  its  branches  that  have  never  been  committed 
to  writing  forms  the  other  and  equally  important  side  which  is 
still  far  from  being  satisfactorily  investigated."  It  is  easy  to 
understand  that  Rapp  came  into  conflict  with  Grimm's  Buch- 
stabenlehre,  that  had  been  based  exclusively  on  -svritten  forms, 
and  Rapp  was  not  afraid  of  expressing  his  unorthodox  views  in 
what  he  himself  terms  "  a  violent  and  arrogating  tone."  No 
wonder,  therefore,  that  his  book  fell  into  disgrace  with  the  leaders 
of  linguistics  in  Germany,  who  noticed  its  errors  and  mistakes, 
which  were  indeed  numerous  and  conspicuous,  rather  than  the  new 
and  sane  ideas  it  contained.  Rapp's  work  is  extraordinarily  little 
known  ;  in  Raumer's  Gesckichte  der  germanischen  Philologie  and 
similar  works  it  is  not  even  mentioned,  and  when  I  disinterred  it 


70        INIIDDLE   OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  hi 

from  undeserved  oblivion  in  my  Fonetik  (1897,  p.  35  ;  cf.  Die 
neueren  Sprachen,  vol.  xiii,  1904)  it  was  utterly  imknown  to  the 
German  phoneticians  of  my  acquaintance.  Yet  not  only  are  its 
phonetic  observations  ^  deserving  of  praise,  but  still  more  its  whole 
plan,  based  as  it  is  on  a  thorough  comprehension  of  the  mutual 
relations  of  sounds  and  writing,  which  led  Rapp  to  use  phonetic 
transcription  throughout,  even  in  connected  specimens  both  of 
living  and  dead  languages  ;  that  this  is  really  the  only  way  in  which 
it  is  possible  to  obtain  a  comprehensive  and  living  understanding 
of  the  sound-system  of  any  language  (as  well  as  to  get  a  clear 
perception  of  the  extent  of  one's  own  ignorance  of  it!)  has  not 
yet  been  generally  recognized.  The  science  of  language  would 
have  made  swifter  and  steadier  progress  if  Grimm  and  his  suc- 
cessors had  been  able  to  assimilate  the  main  thoughts  of  Rapp. 

in.— §3.  J.  H.  Bredsdorff. 

Another  (and  still  earlier)  work  that  was  overlooked  at  the  time 
was  the  little  pamphlet  Om  Aarsagerne  til  Sprogenes  Forandringer 
(1821)  by  the  Dane  J.  H.  Bredsdorlf.  Bopp  and  Grimm  never 
really  asked  themselves  the  fundamental  question.  How  is  it  that 
language  changes  :  what  are  the  driving  forces  that  lead  in  course 
of  time  to  such  far-reaching  differences  as  those  we  find  between 
Sanskrit  and  Latin,  or  between  Latin  and  French  ?  Now,  this  is 
exactly  the  question  that  Bredsdorff  treats  in  his  masterly  pamphlet. 
Like  Rapp,  he  was  a  very  good  phonetician ;  but  in  the  pamphlet 
that  concerns  us  here  he  speaks  not  onl}'  of  phonetic  but  of  other 
linguistic  changes  as  well.  These  he  refers  to  the  following  causes, 
which  he  illustrates  with  well-chosen  examples  :  (1)  IMishearing 
and  misunderstanding  ;  (2)  misrecollection  ;  (3)  imperfection  of 
organs  ;  (4)  indolence  :  to  this  he  inclines  to  refer  nine-tenths 
of  all  those  changes  in  the  pronunciation  of  a  language  that  are 
not  due  to  foreign  influences  ;  (5)  tendency  towards  analogy  :  here 
he  gives  instances  from  the  speech  of  children  and  explains  by 
analogy  such  phenomena  as  the  extension  of  s  to  all  genitives, 
etc.  ;  (6)  the  desire  to  be  distinct ;  (7)  the  need  of  expressing 
new  ideas.  He  recognizes  that  there  are  changes  that  cannot  be 
brought  under  any  of  these  explanations,  e.g.  the  Gothonic  sound 
shift  (cf.  above,  p.  43  note),  and  he  emphasizes  the  many  ways  in 
which  foreign  nations  or  foreign  languages  may  influence  a 
language.     Bredsdorff's  explanations  may  not  always  be  correct ; 

^  For  example,  the  correct  appreciation  of  Scandinavian  o  sounds  and 
especially  the  recognition  of  syllables  without  any  vowel,  for  instance,  in 
G.  mittel,  achmeicheln,  E.  heaven,  little ;  this  important  truth  was  unnoticed 
by  linguists  till  Sievers  in  1876  called  attention  to  it  and  Brugmann  in  1877 
used  it  in  a  famous  article. 


§3]  J.    H.    BREDSDORFF  71 

but  what  constitutes  the  deep  originality  of  his  httle  book  is  the 
way  in  which  linguistic  changes  are  always  regarded  in  terms  of 
human  activity,  chiefly  of  a  psychological  character.  Here  he  was 
head  and  shoulders  above  his  contemporaries  ;  in  fact,  most  of 
Bredsdorff's  ideas,  such  as  the  power  of  analogy,  were  the  same 
that  sixty  years  later  had  to  fight  so  hard  to  be  recognized  by 
the  leading  linguists  of  that  time.^ 


III. — §4.  August  Schleicher. 

In  Kapp,  and  even  more  in  Bredsdorff,  Ave  get  a  whiff  of  the 
scientific  atmosphere  of  a  much  later  time  ;  but  most  of  the  linguists 
of  the  twenties  and  folloAving  decades  (among  whom  A.  F.  Pott 
deserves  to  be  speciall}^  named)  moved  in  essentially  the  same 
grooves  as  Bopp  and  Grimm,  and  it  Avill  not  be  necessary  here  to 
deal  in  detail  with  their  work. 

August  Schleicher  (1821-68)  in  many  ways  marks  the  cul- 
mination of  the  first  period  of  Comparative  Linguistics,  as  well 
as  the  transition  to  a  new  period  wdth  different  aims  and,  partially 
at  any  rate,  a  new  method.  His  intimate  knowledge  of  many 
languages,  his  great  power  of  combination,  his  clear-cut  and  alwaj^s 
lucid  exposition — all  this  made  him  a  natural  leader,  and  made 
his  books  for  many  years  the  standard  handbooks  of  linguistic 
science.  Unlike  Bopp  and  Grimm,  he  was  exclusively  a  linguist, 
or,  as  he  called  it  himself,  '  glottiker,'  and  never  tired  of  claiming 
for  the  science  of  linguistics  ('  glottik  '),  as  opposed  to  philology, 
the  rank  of  a  separate  natural  science.  Schleicher  specialized  in 
Slavonic  and  Lithuanian  ;  he  studied  the  latter  language  in  its 
own  home  and  took  down  a  great  many  songs  and  tales  from  the 
mouths  of  the  peasants  ;  he  was  for  some  years  a  professor  in  the 
University  of  Prague,  and  there  acquired  a  conversational  know- 
ledge of  Czech  ;  he  spoke  Russian,  too,  and  thus  in  contradis- 
tinction to  Bopp  and  Grimm  had  a  first-hand  knowledge  of  more 
than  one  foreign  language  ;  his  interest  in  living  speech  is  also 
manifested  in  his  specimens  of  the  dialect  of  his  native  town, 
Volkstiimliches  aus  Sonneberg.  When  he  was  a  child  his  father 
very  severely  insisted  on  the  constant  and  correct  use  of  the  edu- 
cated language  at  home  ;  but  the  boy,  perhaps  all  the  more  on 
account  of  the  paternal  prohibition,  was  deeply  attracted  to  the 

^  A  young  German  linguist,  to  whom  I  sent  the  pamphlet  early  in  1886, 
wrote  to  me  :  "  Wenn  man  sich  den  spass  machte  imd  das  ding  iibersetzte 
mit  der  bemerkung,  es  sei  vor  vier  jahren  erschienen,  wer  wiirde  einem 
nicht  trauen  ?  Merkwiirdig,  dass  solche  sachen  so  unbemerkt,  '  dem  kleinen 
veilchen  gleich,'  dahinschwinden  konncn."  A  short  time  afterwards  the 
pamphlet  was  reprinted  with  a  short  preface  by  Vilh.  Thomsen  (Copenhagen, 
1886). 


72        MIDDLE   OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  iii 

popular  dialect  he  heard  from  his  playfellows  and  to  the  fas- 
cinating folklore  of  the  old  townspeople,  which  he  was  later  to 
take  down  and  put  into  print.  In  the  preface  he  says  that  the 
acquisition  of  foreign  tongues  is  rendered  considerably  easier 
through  the  habit  of  speaking  two  dialects  from  childhood. 

What  makes  Schleicher  particularly  important  for  the  purposes 
of  this  volume  is  the  fact  that  in  a  long  series  of  publications  he 
put  forth  not  only  details  of  his  science,  but  original  and  compre- 
hensive views  on  the  fundamental  questions  of  linguistic  theorj', 
and  that  these  had  great  influence  on  the  linguistic  philosophy  of 
the  following  decades.  He  was,  perhaps,  the  most  consistent  as  well 
as  one  of  the  clearest  of  linguistic  thinkers,  and  his  views  therefore 
deserve  to  be  examined  in  detail  and  with  the  greatest  care. 

Apart  from  languages,  Schleicher  was  deeply  interested  both 
in  philosophy  and  in  natural  science,  especially  botany.  From 
these  he  fetched  many  of  the  weapons  of  his  armoury,  and  they 
coloured  the  whole  of  his  theory  of  language.  In  his  student  days 
at  Tubingen  he  became  an  enthusiastic  adherent  of  the  philosophy 
of  Hegel,  and  not  even  the  Darwinian  sympathies  and  views  of 
which  he  became  a  champion  towards  the  end  of  his  career  made 
him  abandon  the  doctrines  of  his  youth.  As  for  science,  he  saj's 
that  naturalists  make  us  understand  that  in  science  nothing  is 
of  value  except  facts  established  tlu"ough  strictly  objective  observa- 
tion and  the  conclusions  based  on  such  facts — tliis  is  a  lesson  that 
he  thinks  many  of  his  colleagues  would  do  well  to  take  to  heart. 
There  can  be  no  doubt  that  Schleicher  in  his  practice  followed  a 
much  more  rigorous  and  sober  method  than  his  predecessors, 
and  that  his  Compendium  in  that  respect  stands  far  above  Bopp's 
Orammar.  In  his  general  reasonings  on  the  nature  of  language, 
on  the  other  hand,  Schleicher  did  not  always  follow  the  strict 
principles  of  sober  criticism,  being,  as  we  shall  now  see,  too 
dependent  on  Hegelian  philosophy,  and  also  on  certain  dogmatic 
views  that  he  had  inherited  from  previous  German  linguists, 
from  Schlegel  downwards. 

The  Introductions  to  Schleicher's  two  first  volumes  are  entirely 
Hegelian,  though  wdth  a  characteristic  difference,  for  in  the  first 
he  says  that  the  changes  to  be  seen  in  the  realm  of  languages  are 
decidedly  historical  and  in  no  way  resemble  the  changes  that  we 
may  observe  in  nature,  for  "  however  manifold  these  may  be,  they 
never  show  anything  but  a  circular  course  that  repeats  itself  con- 
tinually "  (Hegel),  while  in  language,  as  in  everything  mental,  we 
may  see  new  things  that  have  never  existed  before.  One  generation 
of  animals  or  plants  is  like  another  ;  the  skill  of  animals  has  no 
histor}^  as  human  art  has  ;  language  is  specifically  human  and 
mental :   its  development  is  therefore  analogous  to  histor/  for  in 


§4]  AUGUST  SCHLEICHER  78 

both  we  see  a  continual  progress  to  new  phases.  In  Schleicher's 
second  volume,  however,  this  view  is  expressly  rejected  in  its 
main  part,  because  Schleicher  now  wants  to  emphasize  the  natural 
character  of  language  :  it  is  true,  he  now  says,  that  language 
shows  a  '  werden  '  which  may  be  termed  history  in  the  wider 
sense  of  this  word,  but  which  is  found  in  its  purest  form  in 
nature ;  for  instance,  in  the  growing  of  a  plant.  Language 
belongs  to  the  natural  sphere,  not  to  the  sphere  of  free  mental 
activity,  and  this  must  be  our  starting-point  if  we  would  discover 
the  method  of  linguistic  science  (ii.  21). 

It  would,  of  course,  be  possible  to  say  that  the  method  of  lin- 
guistic science  is  that  of  natural  science,  and  yet  to  maintain  that 
the  object  of  linguistics  is  different  from  that  of  natural  science, 
but  Schleicher  more  and  more  tends  to  identify  the  two,  and  when 
he  was  attacked  for  saying,  in  his  pamphlet  on  the  Darwinian  theory, 
that  languages  were  material  things,  real  natural  objects,  he  wrote 
in  defence  Ueher  die  bedeutung  der  sprache  fiir  die  naturgeschichte 
des  menschen,  which  is  highly  characteristic  as  the  culminating  point 
of  the  materialistic  way  of  looking  at  languages.     The  activity, 
he  says,  of  any  organ,  e.g.  one  of  the  organs  of  digestion,  or  the  brain 
or  muscles,  is  dependent  on  the  constitution  of  that  organ.    The 
different  ways  in  which  different  species,  nay  even  different  indi- 
viduals, walk  are  evidently  conditioned  by  the  structure  of  the 
limbs  ;  the  activity  or  function  of  the  organ  is,  as  it  were,  nothing 
but  an  aspect  of  the  organ  itself,  even  if  it  is  not  always  possible 
by  means  of  the  knife  or  microscope  of  the  scientist  to  demonstrate 
the  material  cause  of  the  phenomenon.    What  is  true  of  the  manner 
of  walking  is  true  of  language  as  well ;    for  language  is  nothing 
but  the  result,  perceptible  through  the  ear,  of  the  action  of  a  com- 
plex of  material  substances  in  the  structure  of  the  brain  and  of 
the  organs  of  speech,  with  their  nerves,  bones,  muscles,  etc.   Anato- 
mists, however,  have  not  yet  been  able  to  demonstrate  differences 
in  the  structures  of  these  organs  corresponding  to  differences  of 
nationality — to  discriminate,  that  is,  the  organs  of  a  Frenchman 
{qud  Frenchman)  from  those  of  a  German  {qiid  German).     Accord- 
ingly, as  the  chemist  can  only  arrive  at  the  elements  which  com- 
pose the  sun  by  examining  the  light  which  it  emits,  while  the 
source  of  that  light  remains  inaccessible  to  him,  so  must  we  be 
content  to  study  the  nature  of  languages,  not  in  their  material 
antecedents  but  in  their  audible  manifestations.     It  makes    no 
great  difference,  however,  for  "  the  two  things  stand  to  each  other 
as  cause  and  effect,  as  substance  and  phenomenon  :   a  philosopher 
[i.e.  a  Hegehan]  would  say  that  they  are  identical." 

Now  I,  for  one,  fail  to  understand  how  this  can  be  what  Schleicher 
believes  it  to  be,  "a  refutation  of  the  objection  that  language  is 


T4        MIDDLE  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [cii.  iii 

nothing  but  a  consequence  of  the  activity  of  these  organs."  The 
sun  exists  independently  of  the  human  observer  ;  but  there  could 
be  no  such  thing  as  language  if  there  was  not  besides  the  speaker 
a  listener  who  might  become  a  speaker  in  his  turn.  Schleicher 
speaks  continually  in  his  pamphlet  as  if  structural  differences  in 
the  brain  and  organs  of  speech  were  the  real  language,  and  as  if 
it  were  only  for  want  of  an  adequate  method  of  examining  this 
hidden  structure  that  we  had  to  content  ourselves  with  stud3dng 
language  in  its  outward  manifestation  as  audible  speech.  But 
this  is  certainly  on  the  face  of  it  preposterous,  and  scarcely  needs 
any  serious  refutation.  If  the  proof  of  the  pudding  is  in  the 
eating,  the  proof  of  a  language  must  be  in  the  hearing  and  under- 
standing ;  but  in  order  to  be  heard  Avords  must  first  be  spoken, 
and  in  these  two  activities  (that  of  producing  and  that  of  per- 
ceiving sounds)  the  real  essence  of  language  must  consist,  and 
these  two  activities  are  the  primarj'  (or  why  not  the  exclusive  ?) 
object  of  the  science  of  language. 

Schleicher  goes  on  to  meet  another  objection  that  may  be  made 
to  his  view  of  the  '  substantiality  of  language,'  namely,  that  drawn 
from  the  power  of  learning  other  languages.  Schleicher  doubts 
the  possibility  of  learning  another  language  to  perfection  ;  he 
would  admit  this  only  in  the  case  of  a  man  who  exchanged  his 
mother-tongue  for  another  in  his  earliest  youth  ;  ''  but  then  he 
becomes  by  that  very  fact  a  different  being  from  what  he  was  : 
brain  and  organs  of  speech  develop  in  -another  direction."  If 
]\Ir.  So-and-So  is  said  to  speak  and  write  German,  English  and 
French  equally  well,  Schleicher  first  inclines  to  doubt  the  fact ; 
and  then,  granting  that  the  same  individual  may  "be  at  the  same 
time  a  German,  a  Frenchman  and  an  Englishman,"  he  asks  us  to 
remember  that  all  these  three  languages  belong  to  the  same  family 
and  may,  from  a  broader  point  of  view,  be  termed  species  of  the  same 
language ;  but  he  denies  the  possibility  of  anyone's  being  equally 
at  home  in  Chinese  and  German,  or  in  Arabic  and  Hottentot,  etc., 
becau.se  these  languages  are  totally  different  in  their  innermost 
essence.  (But  what  of  bilingual  children  in  Finland,  speaking 
Swedish  and  Finnish,  or  in  Greenland,  speaking  Danish  and  Eskimo, 
or  in  Java,  speaking  Dutch  and  Malaj^  ?)  Schleicher  has  to  admit 
that  our  organs  are  to  some  extent  flexible  and  capable  of  acquiring 
activities  that  they  had  not  at  first ;  but  one  definite  function 
is  and  remains  nevertheless  the  only  natural  one,  and  thus  "  the 
possibility  of  a  man's  acquiring  foreign  languages  more  or  less 
perfectly  is  no  objection  to  our  seeing  the  material  basis  of  lan- 
guage in  the  structure  of  the  brain  and  organs  of  si^eech." 

Even  if  we  admit  that  Schleicher  is  so  far  right  that  in  nearly 
all  (or  all  ?)  cases  of  bilingualism  one  language  comes  more  naturally 


§4]  AUGUST   SCHLEICHER  75 

than  the  other,  he  certainly  exaggerates  the  difference,  which  is 
always  one  of  degree  ;  and  at  any  rate  his  final  conclusion  is  wrong, 
for  we  might  with  the  same  amount  of  justice  say  that  a  man  who 
has  first  learned  to  plaj'  the  piano  has  acquired  the  structure  of 
brain  and  fingers  peculiar  to  a  pianist,  and  that  it  is  then  unnatural 
for  him  also  to  learn  to  play  the  violin,  because  that  would  imply 
a  different  structure  of  these  organs.  In  all  these  cases  we  have  to 
do  with  a  definite  proficiency  or  skill,  which  can  onlj^  be  obtained 
by  constant  practice,  though  of  course  one  man  may  be  better 
predisposed  by  nature  for  it  than  another  ;  but  then  it  is  also  the 
fact  that  people  who  speak  no  foreign  language  attain  to  very 
different  degrees  of  proficiencj^  in  the  use  of  their  mother-tongue. 
It  cannot  be  said  too  emphaticallj^  that  we  have  here  a  fundamental 
question,  and  that  Schleicher's  view  can  never  lead  to  a  true  con- 
ception of  what  language  is,  or  to  a  real  insight  into  its  changes 
and  historical  development. 

Schleicher  goes  on  to  say  that  the  classification  of  mankind  into 
races  should  not  be  based  on  the  formation  of  the  skull  or  on  the 
character  of  the  hair,  or  any  such  external  criteria,  as  they  are  by 
no  means  constant,  but  rather  on  language,  because  this  is  a 
thoroughly  constant  criterion.  This  alone  would  give  a  perfectly 
natural  system,  one,  for  instance,  in  which  all  Turks  would  be 
classed  together,  while  otherwise  the  Osmanli  Turk  belongs  to  the 
'  Caucasian '  race  and  the  so-called  Tataric  Turks  to  the  '  Mon- 
golian '  race  ;  on  the  other  hand,  the  Magyar  and  the  Basque 
are  not  physically  to  be  distinguished  from  the  Indo-European, 
though  their  languages  are  widely  dissimilar.  According  to 
Schleicher,  therefore,  the  natural  system  of  languages  is  also  the 
natural  system  of  mankind,  for  language  is  closely  connected  with 
the  whole  higher  life  of  men,  which  is  therefore  taken  into  con- 
sideration in  and  with  their  language.  In  this  book  I  am  not  con- 
cerned with  the  ethnographical  division  of  mankind  into  races, 
and  I  therefore  must  content  myself  with  saying  that  the  very 
examples  adduced  by  Schleicher  seem  to  me  to  militate  against 
his  theory  that  a  division  of  mankind  based  on  language  is  the 
natural  one  :  are  we  to  reckon  the  Basque's  son,  who  speaks  nothing 
but  French  (or  Spanish)  as  belonging  to  a  different  race  from  his 
father  ?  And  does  not  Schleicher  contradict  himself  when  on 
p.  16  he  writes  that  language  is  "  ein  vollig  constantes  merkmal," 
and  p.  20  that  it  is  "  in  fortwahrender  veranderung  begriffen  "  ? 
So  far  as  I  see,  Schleicher  never  expressly  says  that  he  thinks  that 
the  physical  structure  conditioning  the  structure  of  a  man's  lan- 
guage is  hereditar5^  though  some  of  his  expressions  point  that  way, 
and  that  may  be  what  he  means  by  the  expression  '  constant.' 
In  other  places  (Darw.  25,  Bed.  24)  he  allows  external  conditions 


76        MIDDLE  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  iii 

of  life  to  exercise  some  influence  on  the  character  of  a  language, 
as  when  languages  of  neighbouring  peoples  are  similar  (Aryans 
and  Semites,  for  example,  are  the  only  nations  possessing  flexional 
languages).  On  such  points,  however,  he  gives  only  a  few  hints 
and  suggestions. 


ni.— §  5.  Classification  of  Languages. 

In  the  question  of  the  classification  of  languages  Schleicher 
introduces  a  deductive  element  from  his  strong  preoccupation  with 
Hegehan  ideas,  Hegel  everywhere  moves  in  trilogies  ;  Schleicher 
therefore  must  have  three  classes,  and  consequently  has  to  tack 
together  two  of  Pott"s  four  classes  (agglutinating  and  incorporating) ; 
then  he  is  able  philosophically  to  deduce  the  tripartition.  For 
language  consists  in  meaning  (bedeutung  ;  matter,  contents,  root) 
and  relation  (beziehung ;  form),  tertium  non  datur.  As  it  would 
be  a  sheer  impossibility  for  a  language  to  express  form  only,  we 
obtain  three  classes  : 

I.  Here  meaning  is  the  only  thing  indicated  by  sound  ;  relation 
is  merely  suggested  by  word-position :    isolating  languages. 

II.  Both  meaning  and  relation  are  expressed  by  sound,  but 
the  formal  elements  are  visibly  tacked  on  to  the  root,  which  is 
itself  invariable  :    agglutinating  languages. 

III.  The  elements  of  meaning  and  of  relation  are  fused  together 
or  absorbed  into  a  higher  unity,  the  root  being  susceptible  of 
inward  modification  as  well  as  of  afl&xes  to  denote  form  :  flexional 
languages. 

Schleicher  employs  quasi-mathematical  formulas  to  illustrate 
these  thi'ee  classes  :  if  we  denote  a  root  by  R,  a  prefix  by  p  and 
a  suffix  by  s,  and  finally  use  a  raised  x  to  denote  an  inner  modifica- 
tion, we  see  that  in  the  isolated  languages  we  have  nothing  but 
R  (a  sentence  may  be  represented  by  R  R  R  R  . .  .),  a  word  in  the 
second  class  has  the  formula  R  s  or  p  R  or  p  R  s,  but  in  the  third 
class  we  may  have  p  R^  s  (or  R^  s). 

Now,  according  to  Schleicher  the  three  classes  of  languages 
are  not  only  found  simultaneously  in  the  tongues  of  our  own 
day,  but  they  represent  three  stages  of  linguistic  development ; 
"  to  the  nebeneinander  of  the  system  corresponds  the  nacheinander 
of  history,"  Beyond  the  flexional  stage  no  language  can  attain  ; 
the  symbolic  denotation  of  relation  by  flexion  is  the  highest 
accomplishment  of  language ;  speech  has  here  effectually  real- 
ized its  object,  which  is  to  give  a  faithful  phonetic  image  of 
thought.  But  before  a  language  can  become  flexional  it  must 
have  passed  through  an  isolating  and  an  agglutinating  period. 
Is  this  theory  borne  out  by  historical  facts  ?    Can  we  trace  back 


§5]  CLASSIFICATION  OF  LANGUAGES  77 

any  of  the  existing  flexional  languages  to  agglutination  and 
isolation  ?  Schleicher  himself  answers  this  question  in  the 
negative  :  the  earliest  Latin  was  of  as  good  a  flexional  type  as 
are  the  modern  Romanic  languages.  This  would  seem  a  sort 
of  contradiction  in  terms  ;  but  the  orthodox  Hegelian  is  ready 
with  an  answer  to  any  objection  ;  he  has  the  word  of  his  master 
that  History  cannot  begin  till  the  human  spirit  becomes  "  con- 
scious of  its  own  freedom,"  and  this  consciousness  is  only  possible 
after  the  complete  development  of  language.  The  formation  of 
Language  and  History  are  accordingly  successive  stages  of  human 
activity.  Moreover,  as  history  and  historiography,  i.e.  literature, 
come  into  existence  simultaneously,  Schleicher  is  enabled  to  ex- 
press the  same  idea  in  a  way  that  "  is  only  seemingly  paradoxical," 
namely,  that  the  development  of  language  is  brought  to  a  conclusion 
as  soon  as  literature  makes  its  appearance  ;  this  is  a  crisis  after 
which  language  remains  fixed  ;  language  has  now  become  a  means, 
instead  of  being  the  aim,  of  intellectual  activity.  We  never  meet 
with  any  language  that  is  developing  or  that  has  become  more 
perfect ;  in  historical  times  all  languages  move  only  downhill  ; 
linguistic  history  means  decay  of  languages  as  such,  subjugated 
as  they  are  through  the  gradual  evolution  of  the  mind  to  greater 
freedom. 

The  reader  of  the  above  survey  of  previous  classifications 
will  easily  see  that  in  the  matter  itself  Schleicher  adds  very  little 
of  his  own.  Even  the  expressions,  which  are  here  given  through- 
out in  Schleicher's  own  words,  are  in  some  cases  recognizable 
as  identical  with,  or  closely  similar  to,  those  of  earlier  scholars. 

He  made  one  coherent  system  out  of  ideas  of  classification 
and  development  already  found  in  others.  What  is  new  is  the 
philosophical  substructure  of  Hegelian  origin,  and  there  can  be 
no  doubt  that  Schleicher  imagined  that  by  this  addition  he  con- 
tributed very  much  towards  giving  stability  and  durability  to 
the  whole  system.  And  yet  this  proved  to  be  the  least  stable 
and  durable  part  of  the  structure,  and  as  a  matter  of  fact  the 
Hegelian  reasoning  is  not  repeated  by  a  single  one  of  those  who 
give  their  adherence  to  the  classification.  Nor  can  it  be  said 
to  carry  conviction,  and  undoubtedly  it  has  seemed  to  most 
linguists  at  the  same  time  too  rigid  and  too  unreal  to  have  any 
importance. 

But  apart  from  the  philosophical  argument  the  classification 
proved  very  successful  in  the  particular  shape  it  had  found  in 
Schleicher.  Its  adoption  into  two  such  widely  read  works  as 
Max  Miiller's  and  Whitney's  Lectures  on  the  Science  of  Language 
contributed  very  much  to  the  popularity  of  the  system,  though 
the  former's  attempt  at  ascribing  to  the  tripartition  a  sociological 


78        MIDDLE   OF  NINETEENTH   CENTURY     [cii.  iii 

importance  by  saying  that  juxtaposition  (isolation)  is  characteristic 
of  the  '  family  stage,'  agglutination  of  '  the  nomadic  stage  '  and 
amalgamation  (flexion)  of  the  '  political  stage  '  of  human  society 
was  hardly  taken  seriously  by  anybody. 

The  chief  reasons  for  the  popularity  of  this  classification  are 
not  far  to  seek.  It  is  easy  of  handling  and  appeals  to  the 
natural  fondness  for  clear-cut  formulas  through  its  specious 
appearance  of  regularity  and  rationality.  Besides,  it  flatters 
widespread  prejudices  in  so  far  as  it  places  the  two  groups 
of  languages  highest  that  are  spoken  bj^  those  nations  which 
have  culturally  and  religiously  exercised  the  deepest  influence 
on  the  civilization  of  the  world,  Aryans  and  Semites.  Therefore 
also  Pott's  view,  according  to  which  the  incorporating  or 
'  polysynthetic '  American  languages  possess  the  same  char- 
acteristics that  distinguish  flexion  as  against  agglutination,  only 
in  a  still  higher  degree,  is  generally  tacitly  discarded,  for  obviously 
it  would  not  do  to  place  some  languages  of  American  Indians 
higher  than  Sanskrit  or  Greek.  But  when  these  are  looked  upon 
as  the  very  flower  of  linguistic  development  it  is  quite  natural 
to  regard  the  modern  languages  of  Western  Europe  as  degenerate 
corruptions  of  the  ancient  more  highly  flexional  languages  ;  this 
is  in  perfect  keeping  with  the  prevalent  admiration  for  classical 
antiquity  and  with  the  belief  in  a  far  past  golden  age.  Argu- 
ments such  as  these  may  not  have  been  consciously  in  the  minds 
of  the  framers  of  the  ordinary  classification,  but  there  can  be 
no  doubt  that  they  have  been  unconsciously  working  in  favour 
of  the  system,  though  very  little  thought  seems  to  be  required 
to  show  the  fallacy  of  the  assumption  that  high  civilization 
has  any  intrinsic  and  necessary  connexion  with  the  grammatical 
construction  of  the  language  spoken  by  the  race  or  nation  con- 
cerned. No  language  of  modern  Europe  presents  the  flexional 
type  in  a  purer  shape  than  Lithuanian,  where  we  find  preserved 
nearly  the  same  grammatical  system  as  in  old  Sanskrit,  yet  no 
one  would  assert  that  the  culture  of  Lithuanian  peasants  is  higher 
than  that  of  Shakespeare,  whose  language  has  lost  an  enormous 
amount  of  the  old  flexions.  Culture  and  language  must  be  appraised 
separately,  each  on  its  own  merits  and  independently  of  the 
other. 

From  a  purely  linguistic  point  of  view  there  are  many  objections 
to  the  usual  classification,  and  it  will  be  well  here  to  bring  them 
together,  though  this  will  mean  an  interruption  of  the  historical 
survey  which  is  the  main  object  of  these  chapters. 

First  let  us  look  upon  the  tripartition  as  purporting  a  com- 
prehensive classification  of  languages  as  existing  side  by  side 
without  any  regard  to  historic  development  (the  nebeneinander 


§5]  CLASSIFICATION   OF  LANGUAGES  79 

of  Schleicher).  Here  it  does  not  seem  to  be  an  ideal  manner  of 
classifying  a  great  many  objects  to  establish  three  classes  of  such 
different  dimensions  that  the  first  comprises  only  Chinese  and 
some  other  related  languages  of  the  Far  East,  and  the  third  only 
two  families  of  languages,  while  the  second  includes  hundreds 
of  unrelated  languages  of  the  most  heterogeneous  character. 
It  seems  certain  that  the  languages  of  Class  I  represent  one  definite 
tj'pe  of  linguistic  structure,  and  it  may  be  that  Arj'an  and  Semitic 
should  be  classed  together  on  account  of  the  similarity  of  their 
structure,  though  this  is  by  no  means  quite  certain  and  has  been 
denied  (by  Bopp,  and  in  recent  times  b}^  Porzezinski)  ;  but  what 
is  indubitable  is  that  the  '  agglutinating '  class  is  made  to  com- 
prehend languages  of  the  most  diverse  tyj)e,  even  if  we  follow  Pott 
and  exclude  from  this  class  all  incorporating  languages.  Finnish 
is  always  mentioned  as  a  typically  agglutinative  language,  yet 
there  we  meet  with  such  declensional  forms  as  nominative  vesi 
'  water,'  toinen  '  second,'  partitive  veitd,  toista,  genitive  veclen, 
toisen,  and  such  verbal  forms  as  sido-n  '  I  bind,'  sido-t  '  thou 
bindest,'  sito-o  '  he  binds,'  and  the  three  corresponding  persons 
in  the  plural,  sido-mme,  sido-tte,  sito-vat.  Here  we  are  far  from 
having  one  unchangeable  root  to  which  endings  have  been  glued, 
for  the  root  itself  undergoes  changes  before  the  endings.  In 
Kiyombe  (Congo)  the  perfect  of  verbs  is  in  many  cases  formed 
by  means  of  a  vowel  change  that  is  a  complete  parallel  to  the 
apophonj'  in  English  drink,  drank,  thus  vanga  '  do,"  perfect  vemje, 
twala  '  bring,'  perfect  twele  or  twede,  etc.  {Anthro'pos,  ii.  p.  761). 
Examples  like  these  show  that  flexion,  in  whatever  way  we  may 
define  this  term,  is  not  the  prerogative  of  the  Aryans  and  Semites, 
but  may  be  found  in  other  nations  as  well.  '  Agglutination  '  is 
either  too  vague  a  term  to  be  used  in  classification,  or  else,  if  it 
is  taken  strictly  according  to  the  usual  definition,  it  is  too  definite 
to  comprise  many  of  the  languages  which  are  ordinarily  reckoned 
to  belong  to  the  second  class. 

It  will  be  seen,  also,  that  those  writers  who  aim  at  giving  descrip- 
tions of  a  variety  of  human  tongues,  or  of  them  all,  do  not  content 
themselves  with  the  usual  three  classes,  but  have  a  greater  number. 
This  began  with  Steinthal,  who  in  various  works  tried  to  classify 
languages  partly  from  geographical,  partly  from  structural  points 
of  view,  without,  however,  arriving  at  any  definite  or  consistent 
system.  Friedi'ich  Miiller,  in  his  great  Grundriss  der  Sprachwis- 
senschaft,  really  gives  up  the  psychological  or  structural  division  of 
languages,  distributing  the  more  than  hundied  different  languages 
that  he  describes  among  twelve  races  of  mankind,  characterized 
chiefly  by  external  criteria  that  have  nothing  to  do  with  language. 
Misteli  establishes  six  main  types  :    I.  Incorporating.     II.  Root- 


80        MIDDLE  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  iii 

isolating.  III.  Stem-isolating.  IV.  Affixing  (Anreihende).  V.  Ag- 
glutinating. VI.  Flexional.  These  he  also  distributes  so  as 
to  form  four  classes  :  (1)  languages  with  sentence-words  :  I ; 
(2)  languages  with  no  words  :  II,  III  and  IV  ;  (3)  languages  with 
apparent  words  :  V  ;  and  (4)  languages  with  real  words :  VI. 
But  the  latter  division  had  better  be  left  alone  ;  it  turns  on 
the  intricate  question  "  What  constitutes  a  word  ?  "  and  ulti- 
mately depends  on  the  usual  depreciation  of  '  inferior  races  ' 
and  corresponding  exaltation  of  our  own  race,  which  is  alone 
reputed  capable  of  possessing  '  real  words.'  I  do  not  see  why 
we  should  not  recognize  that  the  vocables  of  Greenlandic, 
Malay,  Kafir  or  Finnish  are  just  as  '  real '  words  as  any  in 
Hebrew  or  Latin. 

Our  final  result,  then,  is  that  the  tripartition  is  insufficient  and 
inadequate  to  serve  as  a  comprehensive  classification  of  languages 
actually  existing.  Nor  shall  we  wonder  at  this  if  we  see  the  way 
in  which  the  theory  began  historically  in  an  obiter  dictum  of  Fr.  v. 
Schlegel  at  a  time  when  the  inner  structure  of  only  a  few  languages 
had  been  properly  studied,  and  if  we  consider  the  lack  of  clearness 
and  definiteness  inherent  in  such  notions  as  agglutination  and 
flexion,  which  are  nevertheless  made  the  corner-stones  of  the 
whole  system.  We  therefore  must  go  back  to  the  wise  saying 
of  Humboldt  quoted  on  p.  59,  that  the  structural  diversities  of 
languages  are  too  great  for  us  to  classify  them  comprehensively. 

In  a  subsequent  part  of  this  work  I  shall  deal  -with  the 
tripartition  as  representing  three  successive  stages  in  the 
development  of  such  languages  as  our  own  (the  nacheinander 
of  Schleicher),  and  try  to  show  that  Schleicher's  view  is  not 
borne  out  by  the  facts  of  linguistic  history,  which  give  us  a 
totally  different  pictm-e  of  development. 

From  both  points  of  view,  then,  I  think  that  the  classifica- 
tion here  considered  deserves  to  be  shelved  among  the  hasty 
generalizations  in  which  the  history  of  every  branch  of  science 
is  unfortunately  so  rich. 

in. — §6.  Reconstruction. 

Probably  Schleicher's  most  original  and  important  contribution 
to  linguistics  was  his  reconstruction  of  the  Proto-Aryan  language, 
die  indogermanische  ursprache.  The  possibility  of  inferentially 
constructing  this  parent  language,  which  to  Sanskrit,  Greek,  Latin, 
Gothic,  etc.,  was  what  Latin  was  to  ItaUan,  Spanish,  Fi-ench, 
etc.,  was  early  in  his  thoughts  (see  quotations  illustrating  the 
gradual  growth  of  the  idea  in  Oertel,  p.  39  f.),  but  it  was  not 
till  the  first  edition  of  his  Compendium  that  he  carried  it  out  in 


§  6]  RECONSTRUCTION  81 

detail,  giving  there  for  each  separate  chapter  (vowels,  consonantK, 
roots,  stem-formation,  declension,  conjugation)  first  the  Proto- 
Aryan  forms  and  then  those  actually  found  in  the  different  languages, 
from  which  the  former  were  inferred.  This  arrangement  has  the 
advantage  that  the  reader  everywhere  sees  the  historical  evolution 
in  the  natural  order,  beginning  with  the  oldest  and  then  proceeding 
to  the  later  stages,  just  as  the  Romanic  scholar  begins  with  Latin 
and  then  takes  in  successive  stages  Old  French,  Modern  French, 
etc.  But  in  the  case  of  Proto-Aryan  this  procedure  is  apt  to 
deceive  the  student  and  make  him  take  these  primitive  forms 
as  something  certain,  whose  existence  reposes  on  just  as  good 
evidence  as  the  forms  found  in  Sanskrit  literature  or  in  German 
or  English  as  spoken  in  our  own  days.  When  he  finds  some  forms 
given  first  and  used  to  explain  some  others,  there  is  some  danger 
of  his  forgetting  that  the  forms  given  first  have  a  quite  different 
status  to  the  others,  and  that  their  only  raison  d'etre  is  the  desire 
of  a  modern  linguist  to  explain  existing  forms  in  related  languages 
which  present  certain  similarities  as  originating  from  a  common 
original  form,  which  he  does  not  find  in  his  texts  and  has,  there- 
fore, to  reconstruct.  But  apart  from  this  there  can  be  no  doubt 
that  the  reconstruction  of  older  forms  (and  the  ingenious  device, 
due  to  Schleicher,  of  denoting  such  forms  by  means  of  a  preposed 
asterisk  to  distinguish  them  from  forms  actually  found)  has  been 
in  many  waj^s  beneficial  to  historical  grammar.  Only  it  may 
be  questioned  whether  Schleicher  did  not  go  too  far  when  he  wished 
to  base  the  whole  grammar  of  all  the  Arj'an  languages  on  such 
reconstructions,  instead  of  using  them  now  and  then  to  explain 
single  facts. 

Schleicher  even  ventured  (and  in  this  he  seems  to  have  had  no 
follower)  to  construct  an  entire  little  fable  in  primitive  Aryan: 
see  "  Eine  fabel  in  indogermanischer  ursprache,"  Beitrdge  zur  vergl. 
sprachfoTSchung ,  5.  206  (1868).  In  the  introductory  remarks  he 
complains  of  the  difficulty  of  such  attempts,  chiefi}^  because  of 
the  almost  complete  lack  of  particles  capable  of  being  inferred 
from  the  existing  languages,  but  he  seems  to  have  entertained 
no  doubt  about  the  phonetic  and  grammatical  forms  of  the  words 
he  employed.  As  the  fable  is  not  now  commonly  known,  I  give 
it  here,  with  Schleicher's  translation,  as  a  document  of  this  period 
of  comparative  linguistics. 

AVIS   AKVASAS   KA 

Avis,  jasmin  varna  na  a  ast,  dadarka  akvams,  tam,  vagham 
garum  vaghantam,  tam,  bharam  magham,  tam,  manum  aku 
bharantam.  Avis  akvabhjams  a  vavakat :  kard  aghnutai  mai 
vidanti  manum  akvams  agantam. 

6 


82        MIDDLE   OF  NINETEENTH   CENTURY     [ch.  iii 

Akvasas  a  vavakant :  krudhi  avai,  kard  aghnutai  vividvant- 
sva.s  :  inanus  patis  varnam  avisams  karnanti  svabhjam  gharmam 
vastram  avibhjams  ka  varna  na  asti. 

Tat  kukruvants  avis  agrara  a  bhugat. 

[DAS]    SCHAF   UND    [DIE]   ROSSE 

[Ein]  schaf,  [auf]  welchem  woUe  nicht  war  (ein  gcschorencs 
schaf)  sah  rosse,  das  [einen]  schweren  wagen  fahrend,  das  [eine] 
grosse  last,  das  [einen]  menschen  schnell  tragend.  [Das]  schaf 
sprach  [zu  den]  rosscn  :  [Das]  herz  wird  beengt  [in]  mir  (es  thut 
mir  herzlich  leid),  sehend  [den]  menschen  [die]  rosse  treibend. 

[Die]  rosse  sprachen  :  Hore  schaf,  [das]  herz  wird  beengt  [in 
den]  gesehend-habenden  (cs  thut  uns  herzlich  leid,  da  wir  wissen)  : 
[der]  mensch,  [der]  herr  macht  [die]  wolle  [der]  schafe  [zu  einem] 
warraen  kleide  [fur]  sich  und  [den]  schafen  ist  nicht  wolle  (die 
schafe  aber  haben  keine  wolle  mehr,  sie  werden  geschorcn  ;  es 
geht  ihnen  noch  schlechter  als  den  rossen). 

Dies  gehort  habend  bog  (entwich)  [das]  schaf  [auf  das]  feld 
(es  machte  sich  aus  dem  staube). 

The  question  here  naturally  arises  :  Is  it  possible  in  the  way 
initiated  by  Schleicher  to  reconstruct  extinct  linguistic  stages, 
and  what  degree  of  probability  can  be  attached  to  the  forms  thus 
created  by  linguists  ?  The  answer  certainly  must  be  that  in  some 
instances  the  reconstruction  may  have  a  very  strong  degree  of 
probability,  namely,  if  the  data  on  which  it  is  based  are  unam- 
biguous and  the  form  to  be  reconstructed  is  not  far  removed 
from  that  or  those  actually  found  ;  but  that  otherwise  any  re- 
construction becomes  doubtful,  and  naturally  the  more  so  according 
to  the  extent  of  the  reconstruction  (as  when  a  whole  text  is  con- 
structed) and  to  the  distance  in  time  that  intervenes  between  the 
known  and  the  unknown  stage.  If  we  look  at  the  genitives  of 
Lat.  genus  and  Gr.  genos,  which  are  found  as  generis  and  genous, 
it  is  easy  to  see  that  both  presuppose  a  form  with  <s  between  two 
vowels,  as  we  see  a  great  many  intervocalic  s's  becoming  r  in  Latin 
and  disappearing  in  Greek  ;  but  when  Schleicher  gives  as  the 
prototype  of  both  (and  of  corresponding  forms  in  the  other  lan- 
guages) Ai-yan  ganasas,  he  oversteps  the  limits  of  the  permissible 
in  so  far  as  lie  ascribes  to  the  vowels  definite  sounds  not  reallj'' 
warranted  by  the  known  forms.  If  we  knew  the  modern  Scan- 
dinavian languages  and  English  only,  we  should  not  hesitate  to 
give  to  the  Proto-Gothonic  genitive  of  the  word  for  '  mother  ' 
the  ending  -s,  cf.  Dan.  moders,  E.  mother'' s  ;  but  G.  der  mutter 
suffices  to  show  that  the  conclusion  is  not  safe,  and  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  both  in  Old  Norse  and  in  Old  English  the  genitive  of  this 


§  6]  RECONSTRUCTION  88 

word  is  without  an  s.  An  analogous  case  is  presented  when 
Schleicher  reconstructs  the  nom.  of  the  word  for  '  father  '  as 
patars,  because  he  presupposes  -s  as  the  invariable  sign  of  every 
nom.  8g.  masc,  although  in  this  particular  word  not  a  single  one 
of  the  old  languages  has  -s  in  the  nominative.  All  Schleicher's 
reconstructions  are  based  on  the  assumption  that  Primitive  Aryan 
had  a  very  simple  structure,  only  few  consonant  and  fewer  vowel 
sounds,  and  great  regularity  in  morphology ;  but,  as  we  shall  see, 
this  assumption  is  completely  gratuitous  and  was  exploded  only 
a  few  years  after  his  death.  Gabelentz  (Spr  182),  therefore,  was 
right  when  he  said,  with  a  certain  irony,  that  the  Aryan  ursprache 
had  changed  beyond  recognition  in  the  short  time  between 
Schleicher  and  Brugmann.  The  moral  to  be  drawn  from  all 
this  seems  to  be  that  hypothetical  and  starred  forms  should  be 
used  sparingly  and  with  the  extremest  caution. 

With  regard  to  inferential  forms  denoted  by  a  star,  the  follow- 
ing note  may  not  be  out  of  place  here.  Their  purely  theoretical 
character  is  not  always  realized.  An  example  will  illustrate  what 
I  mean.  If  etymological  dictionaries  give  as  the  origin  of  F. 
menage  (OF.  maisnage)  a  Latin  form  ^mattsionaticum,  the  etymology 
may  be  correct  although  such  a  Latin  word  may  never  at  any 
time  have  been  uttered.  The  word  was  framed  at  some  date, 
no  one  knows  exactly  when,  from  the  word  which  at  various 
times  had  the  forms  (ace.)  mansionem,  *masione,  maison,  by 
means  of  the  ending  which  at  first  had  the  form  -aticurn  (as 
in  viaticum),  and  finally  (through  several  intermediate  stages) 
became  -age ;  but  at  what  stage  of  each  the  two  elements  met  to 
make  the  word  which  eventually  became  menage,  no  one  can  tell, 
so  that  the  only  thing  really  asserted  is  that  if  the  word  had  been 
formed  at  a  very  early  date  (which  is  far  from  probable)  it  would 
have  been  mnnsionaticum.  It  would,  therefore,  perhaps  be  more 
correct  to  say  that  the  word  is  from  mansione  -f-  -aticurn. 

m.— §  7.  Curtius,  Madvig,  and  Specialists. 

Second  only  to  Schleicher  among  the  linguists  of  those  days 
was  Georg  Curtius  (1820-85),  at  one  time  his  colleague  in  the 
University  of  Prague.  Curtius's  special  study  was  Greek,  and  his 
books  on  the  Greek  verb  and  on  Greek  etymology  cleared  up  a 
great  many  doubtful  points  ;  he  also  contributed  very  much  to 
bridge  the  gulf  between  classical  philology  and  Aryan  linguistics. 
His  views  on  general  questions  were  embodied  in  the  book  Zur 
Chronologie  der  indogermanischen  Sprachforschung  (1873).  While 
Schleicher  died  when  his  fame  was  at  its  highest  and  his  theories 
were  seemingly  victorious  in  all  the  leading  circles,  Curtius  had 


8 1        MIDDLE    OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY    [en.  iii 

the  misfortune  to  see  a  generation  of  younger  men,  including  some 
of  his  own  best  disciples,  such  as  Brugraann,  advance  theories  that 
seemed  to  him  to  be  in  conflict  with  the  most  essential  principles 
of  his  cherished  science  ;  and  though  he  himself,  like  Schleicher, 
had  always  been  in  favour  of  a  stricter  observance  of  sound- 
laws  than  his  predecessors,  his  last  book  was  a  polemic  against 
those  younger  scholffrs  who  carried  the  same  point  to  the  excess 
of  admitting  no  exceptions  at  all,  who  believed  in  innumerable 
analogical  formations  even  in  the  old  languages,  and  whose  re- 
constructions of  primitive  forms  appeared  to  the  old  man  as 
deprived  of  that  classical  beauty  of  the  ursprache  which  was 
represented  in  his  own  and  Schleicher's  works  {Zur  Kritik  der 
neuesten  Sprachjorschunq ,  1885).     But  this  is  anticipating. 

If  Curtius  was  a  comi^arativist  with  a  sound  knowledge  of 
classical  philology,  Johan  Nikolai  Madvig  was  pre-eminently  a 
classical  philologist  who  took  a  great  interest  in  general  linguistics 
and  brought  his  critical  acumen  and  sober  common  sense  to  bear 
on  many  of  the  problems  that  exercised  the  minds  of  his  contem- 
poraries. He  was  opposed  to  everything  of  a  vague  and  mystical 
nature  in  the  current  theories  of  language  and  disliked  the  tendency 
of  some  scholars  to  find  dcep-lj'ing  mysterious  powers  at  the  root 
of  linguistic  phenomena.  But  he  probably  went  too  far  in  his 
rationalism,  for  example,  when  he  entirely  denied  the  existence 
of  the  sound-symbolism  on  which  Humboldt  had  expatiated. 
He  laid  much  stress  on  the  identity  of  the  linguistic  faculty  in 
all  ages  :  the  first  speakers  had  no  more  intention  than  people 
to-day  of  creating  anything  systematic  or  that  would  be  good 
for  all  times  and  all  occasions — they  could  have  no  other  object 
in  view  than  that  of  making  themselves  understood  at  the  moment ; 
hence  the  want  of  system  which  we  find  everywhere  in  languages  : 
a  different  number  of  cases  in  singular  and  plural,  different  endings, 
etc.  Madvig  did  not  escape  some  inconsistencies,  as  when  he 
himself  would  explain  the  use  of  the  soft  vowel  a  to  denote  the 
feminine  gender  by  a  kind  of  sound-symbolism,  or  when  he  thought 
it  possible  to  determine  in  what  order  the  different  grammatical 
ideas  presented  themselves  to  primitive  man  (tense  relation  first 
in  the  verb,  number  before  case  in  the  noun).  He  attached  too 
little  value  to  phonological  and  etymological  research,  but  on 
the  whole  his  views  were  sounder  than  many  which  were  set  forth 
on  the  same  subjects  at  the  time  ;  his  papers,  however,  were  very 
little  known,  partly  because  they  were  written  in  Danish,  partly 
because  his  style  was  extremely  heavy  and  difficult,  and  when 
he  finally  brought  out  his  Kleine  philologische  schriften  in  German 
(1875),  he  expressed  his  regret  in  the  preface  at  finding  that 
many  of  the  theories  he  had  put  forward  j'ears  before  in  Danish 


§7]      CURTIUS,  MADVIG,   AND  SPECIALISTS  85 

had  in  the  meantime  been  independently  arrived  at  by  Whitney, 
who  had  had  the  advantage  of  expressing  them  in  a  world-language. 
One  of  the  most  important  features  of  the  period  with  which 
we  are  here  dealing  is  the  development  of  a  number  of  special 
branches  of  historical  linguistics  on  a  comparative  basis.  Curtius's 
work  on  Greek  might  be  cited  as  one  example  ;  in  the  same  way 
there  were  specialists  in  Sanskrit  (Westergaard  and  Benfey  among 
others),  in  Slavonic  (IMiklosich  and  Schleicher),  in  Keltic  (Zeuss), 
etc.  Grimm  had  numerous  followers  in  the  Gothonic  or  Germanic 
field,  while  in  Romanic  philology  there  Avas  an  active  and  flourishing 
school,  headed  by  Friedrich  Diez,  whose  Grammatik  der  romanischen 
Sprachen  and  Etymologisches  Worterbuch  der  romanischen  Sprachen 
were  perhaps  the  best  introduction  to  the  methodical  study  of 
linguistics  that  anyone  could  desire  ;  the  writer  of  these  lines 
looks  back  with  the  greatest  gratitude  to  that  period  of  his  j'^outh 
when  he  had  the  good  fortune  to  make  the  acquaintance  of  these 
truly  classical  works.  Everything  was  so  well  arranged,  so  care- 
fully thought  out  and  so  lucidly  explained,  that  one  had  every- 
where the  pleasant  feeling  that  one  was  treading  on  firm  ground, 
the  more  so  as  the  basis  of  the  whole  was  not  an  artificially  con- 
structed nebulous  ursprache,  but  the  familiar  forms  and  words  of 
an  historical  language.  Here  one  witnessed  the  gradual  differ- 
entiation of  Latin  into  seven  or  eight  distinct  languages,  whose 
development  it  was  possible  to  follow  century  by  century  in  well- 
authenticated  texts.  The  picture  thus  displayed  before  one's 
eyes  of  actual  linguistic  growth  in  all  domains — sounds,  forms, 
word-formation,  syntax — and  (a  very  important  corollary)  of  the 
interdef)endence  of  these  domains,  could  not  but  leave  a  very 
strong  impression — not  merely  enthusiasm  for  what  had  been 
achieved  here,  but  also  a  salutary  skepticism  of  theories  in  other 
fields  which  had  not  a  similarly  solid  basis. 

m.— §  8.  Max  MtiUer  and  Whitney. 

Working,  as  we  have  seen,  in  many  fields,  linguists  had  now 
brought  to  light  a  shoal  of  interesting  facts  affecting  a  great  many 
languages  and  had  put  forth  valuable  theories  to  explain  these 
facts  ;  but  most  of  their  work  remained  difficult  of  access  except 
to  the  specialist,  and  very  little  was  done  by  the  experts  to  impart 
to  educated  people  in  general  those  results  of  the  new  science 
which  might  be  enjoyed  without  deeper  study.  But  in  1861  Max 
Miiller  gave  the  first  series  of  those  Lectures  on  the  Science  of 
Language  which,  in  numerous  editions,  did  more  than  anything 
else  to  popularize  linguistics  and  served  to  initiate  a  great  many 
students  into  our  science.     In   many  ways   these   lectures  were 


86        MroDLE  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [ch.  hi 

excellently  adapted  for  this  purpose,  for  the  author  had  a  certain 
knack  of  selecting  interesting  illustrations  and  of  presenting  his 
subject  in  a  way  that  tended  to  create  the  same  enthusiasm  for 
it  that  he  felt  himself.  But  his  arguments  do  not  bear  a  close 
inspection.  Too  often,  after  stating  a  problem,  he  is  found  to  fly 
off  at  a  tangent  and  to  forget  what  he  has  set  out  to  prove  for  the 
sake  of  an  interesting  etymology  or  a  clever  paradox.  He  gives  an 
uncritical  acceptance  to  many  of  Schleicher's  leading  ideas  ;  thus, 
the  science  of  linguistics  is  to  him  a  physical  science  and  has 
nothing  to  do  with  philology,  which  is  an  historical  science.  If, 
however,  we  look  at  the  book  itself,  we  shall  find  that  everything 
that  he  counts  on  to  secure  the  interest  of  his  reader,  everything 
that  made  his  lectures  so  popular,  is  really  non-naturalistic  :  all 
those  brilliant  exposes  of  word-history  are  really  like  historical 
anecdotes  in  a  book  on  social  evolution  ;  they  may  have  some 
bearing  on  the  fundamental  problems,  but  these  are  rarely  or 
never  treated  as  real  problems  of  natural  science.  Nor  does  he, 
when  taken  to  task,  maintain  his  view  very  seriously,  but  partly 
retracts  it  and  half-heartedly  ensconces  himself  behind  the  dictum 
that  everything  depends  on  the  definition  you  give  of  ''  physical 
science "  (see  especially  Ch  234,  442,  497) — thus  calling  forth 
Whitney's  retort  that  "  the  implication  here  is  that  our  author 
has  a  right  at  his  own  good  pleasure  to  lay  down  such  a  definition 
of  a  physical  science  as  should  make  the  name  properly  applicable 
to  the  study  of  this  particular  one  among  the  products  of  human 
capacities.  ...  So  he  may  prove  that  a  whale  is  a  fish,  if  you  only 
allow  him  to  define  what  a  fish  is  "  (M  23  f.). 

Though  Schleicher  and  Max  Miiller  in  their  own  day  had  few 
followers  in  defining  linguistics  as  a  natural  or  physical  science — 
the  opposite  view  was  taken,  for  instance,  by  Curtius  (K  154), 
Madvig  and  Whitney — there  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  naturalistic 
point  of  view  practically,  though  perhaps  chiefly  unconsciously, 
had  wide-reaching  effects  on  the  history  of  linguistic  science.  It 
was  intimately  connected  with  the  problems  chiefly  investigated 
and  with  the  way  in  which  they  were  treated.  From  Grimm 
through  Pott  to  Schleicher  and  his  contemporaries  we  see  a  growing 
interest  in  phonological  comparisons  ;  more  and  more  "  sound- 
laws  "  were  discovered,  and  those  found  were  more  and  more 
rigorously  applied,  with  the  result  that  etymological  investigation 
was  attended  with  a  degree  of  exactness  of  which  former  genera- 
tions had  no  idea.  But  as  these  phonological  studies  were  not, 
as  a  rule,  based  on  a  real,  penetrating  insight  into  the  nature 
of  speech-sounds,  the  work  of  the  etymologist  tended  more  and 
more  to  be  purely  mechanical,  and  the  science  of  language  was 
to  a  great   extent    deprived  of  those  elementa  which  are  more 


§8]  MAX   MULLER   AND   WHITNEY  87 

intimately  connected  with  the  human  '  soul.'  Isolated  vowels 
and  consonants  were  compared,  isolated  flexional  forms  and  iso- 
lated words  were  treated  more  and  more  in  detail  and  explained 
by  other  isolated  forms  and  words  in  other  languages,  all  of  them 
being  like  dead  leaves  shaken  off  a  tree  rather  than  parts  of  a 
living  and  moving  whole.  The  speaking  individual  and  the  speak- 
ing community  were  too  much  lost  sight  of.  Too  often  compara- 
tivists  gained  a  considerable  acquaintance  with  the  sound-laws 
and  the  grammatical  forms  of  various  languages  without  knowing 
much  about  those  languages  themselves,  or  at  any  rate  without 
possessing  any  degree  of  familiarity  with  them.  Schleicher  was 
not  blind  to  the  danger  of  this.  A  short  time  before  his  death 
he  brought  out  an  Indogermanische  Chrestomathie  (Weimar,  1869), 
and  in  the  preface  he  justifies  his  book  by  saying  that  "  it  is  of 
great  value,  besides  learning  the  grammar,  to  be  acquainted,  how- 
ever slightly,  with  the  languages  themselves.  For  a  comparative 
grammar  of  related  languages  lays  stress  on  what  is  common  to 
a  language  and  its  sisters  ;  consequently,  the  languages  may  appear 
more  alike  than  they  are  in  reality,  and  their  idiosyncrasies  may 
be  thrown  into  the  shade.  Linguistic  specimens  form,  therefore, 
an  indispensable  supplement  to  comparative  grammar."  Other 
and  even  more  weighty  reasons  might  have  been  adduced,  for 
grammar  is  after  all  only  one  side  of  a  language,  and  it  is  certainly 
the  best  plan,  if  one  wants  to  understand  and  appreciate  the 
position  of  any  language,  to  start  with  some  connected  texts 
of  tolerable  length,  and  only  afterwards  to  see  how  its  forms  are 
related  to  and  may  be  explained  by  those  of  other  languages. 

Though  the  mechanical  school  of  linguists,  with  whom  historical 
and  comparative  phonology  was  more  and  more  an  end  in  itself, 
prevailed  to  a  great  extent,  the  trend  of  a  few  linguists  was  different. 
Among  these  one  must  especially  mention  Heymann  Steinthal, 
who  drew  his  inspiration  from  Humboldt  and  devoted  numerous 
works  to  the  psychology  of  language.  Unfortunately,  Steinthal  was 
greatly  inferior  to  Schleicher  in  clearness  and  consistency  of 
thought :  "  When  I  read  a  work  of  Steinthal's,  and  even  many 
parts  of  Humboldt,  I  feel  as  if  walking  through  shifting  clouds," 
Max  Miiller  remarks,  with  good  reason,  in  a  letter  {Life,  i.  256). 
This  obscurity,  in  connexion  with  the  remoteness  of  Steinthal's 
studies,  which  ranged  from  Chinese  to  the  language  of  the  Mande 
negroes,  but  paid  little  regard  to  European  languages,  prevented 
him  from  exerting  any  powerful  influence  on  the  linguistic  thought 
of  his  generation,  except  perhaps  through  his  emphatic  assertion 
of  the  truth  that  language  can  only  be  understood  and  explained 
by  means  of  psychology  :  his  explanation  of  syntactic  attraction 
paved  the  way  for  much  in  Paul's  Prinzipien. 


88        MIDDLE   OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY     [en.  iii 

The  leading  exponent  of  general  linguistics  after  the  death  of 
Schleicher  was  the  American  William  Dwight  Whitney,  whose 
books,  Language  and  the  Study  of  Language  (first  ed.  1867)  and 
its  replica,  The  Life  and  Growth  of  Language  (1875),  were  translated 
into  several  languages  and  were  hardly  less  popular  than  those 
of  his  antagonist,  Max  Miiller.  Whitney's  style  is  less  brilliant 
than  Max  Miiller's,  and  he  scorns  the  cheap  triumphs  which  the 
latter  gains  by  the  multiplication  of  interesting  illustrations ; 
he  never  wearies  of  running  down  Miiller's  paradoxes  and  incon- 
sistencies,^ from  which  he  himself  was  spared  by  his  greater  general 
solidity  and  sobriety  of  thought.  The  chief  point  of  divergence 
between  them  was,  as  already  indicated,  that  Whitney  looked 
upon  language  as  a  human  institution  that  has  grown  slowly  out 
of  the  necessity  for  mutual  understanding  ;  he  was  opposed  to  all 
kinds  of  mysticism,  and  words  to  him  were  conventional  signs — 
not,  of  course,  that  he  held  that  there  ever  was  a  gathering  of 
people  that  settled  the  meaning  of  each  word,  but  in  the  sense 
of  "resting  on  a  mutual  understanding  or  a  community  of  habit," 
no  matter  how  brought  about.  But  in  spite  of  all  differences 
between  the  two  they  are  in  many  respects  alike,  when  viewed  from 
the  coign  of  vantage  of  the  twentieth  century  :  both  give  expres- 
sion to  the  best  that  had  been  attained  by  fifty  or  sixty  years  of 
painstaking  activity  to  elucidate  the  mysteries  of  speech,  and 
especially  of  Aryan  words  and  forms,  and  neither  of  them  was 
deeply  original  enough  to  see  through  many  of  the  fallacies  of  the 
young  science.  Consequently,  their  views  on  the  structure  of 
Proto-Aryan,  on  roots  and  their  role,  on  the  building-up  and  decay 
of  the  form-system,  are  essentially  the  same  as  those  of  their  con- 
temporaries, and  many  of  their  theories  have  now  crumbled  away, 
including  much  of  what  they  probably  thought  firmly  rooted  for 
all  time. 

1  In  numerous  papers  in  North  Am.  Review  and  elsewhere,  and  finally 
in  the  pamphlet  Max  Miiller  and  the  Science  of  Language,  a  Criticism  (New 
York,  1892).  Miiller's  reply  to  the  earlier  attacks  is  foimd  in  Chips  from 
a  Oerman  Workshop,  vol.  iv. 


CHAPTER  IV 
END    OF    NINETEENTH    CENTURY 

§  1.  Achievements  about  1870.     §  2.  New  Discoverieg.     §  3.  Phonetic  Law« 
and  Analogy.     §  4.  General  Tendencies. 

IV. — §  1.  Achievements  about  1870. 

Ix  works  of  this  period  one  frequently  meets  with  expressions 
of  pride  and  joy  in  the  wonderful  results  that  had  been  achieved 
in  comparative  linguistics  in  the  course  of  a  few  decades.  Thus 
Max  Muller  writes  :  "  All  this  becomes  clear  and  intelligible  by 
the  light  of  Comparative  Grammar  ;  anomalies  vanish,  excep- 
tions prove  the  rule,  and  we  perceive  more  plainly  every  day 
how  in  language,  as  elsewhere,  the  conflict  between  the  freedom 
claimed  by  each  individual  and  the  resistance  offered  by  the 
community  at  large  establishes  in  the  end  a  reign  of  law  most 
wonderful,  yet  perfectly  rational  and  intelligible " ;  and  again  : 
"  There  is  nothing  accidental,  nothing  irregular,  nothing  without 
a  purpose  and  meaning  in  any  part  of  Greek  or  Latin  grammar. 
No  one  who  has  once  discovered  this  hidden  life  of  language, 
no  one  who  has  once  found  out  that  what  seemed  to  be  merely 
anomalous  and  whimsical  in  language  is  but,  as  it  were,  a 
petrification  of  thought,  of  deep,  curious,  poetical,  philosophical 
thought,  will  ever  rest  again  till  he  has  descended  as  far  as  he 
can  descend  into  the  ancient  shafts  of  human  speech,"  etc. 
(Ch  41  f.),  Whitney  says ;  "  The  difference  between  the  old 
haphazard  style  of  etymologizing  and  the  modern  scientific 
method  lies  in  this  :  that  the  latter,  while  allowing  everything 
to  be  theoretically  possible,  accepts  nothing  as  actual  which 
is  not  proved  by  sufficient  evidence  ;  it  brings  to  bear  upon 
each  individual  case  a  wide  circle  of  related  facts ;  it  im- 
poses upon  the  student  the  necessity  of  extended  comparison 
and  cautious  deduction ;  it  makes  him  careful  to  inform  himself 
as  thoroughly  as  circumstances  allow  respecting  the  history  of 
every  word  he  deals  with "  (L  386).  And  Benfey,  in  his 
Geschichte  der  Sprachwissetischaft  (1869,  see  pp.  562  f.  and  596), 
arrives  at  the  conclusion  that  the  investigation  of  Aryan  languages 
has  already  attained  a  very  great  degree  of  certainty,  and  that 
the  reconstruction   of   Primitive  Aryan,   both   in  grammar   and 


90  END  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY       [cii.  iv 

vocabulary,  must  be  considered  as  in  the  main  settled  in  such 
a  way  that  only  some  details  are  still  doubtful  ;  thus,  it  is  certain 
that  the  first  person  singular  ended  in  -mi,  and  that  this  is  a 
phonetic  reduction  of  the  pronoun  ma,  and  that  the  word  for 
'  horse  '  was  akva.  This  feeling  of  pride  is  certainly  in  a  great 
measure  justified  if  we  compare  the  achievements  of  linguistic 
science  at  that  date  with  the  etymologies  of  the  eighteenth 
century ;  it  must  also  be  acknowledged  that  90  per  cent, 
of  the  etjanologies  in  the  best-known  Aryan  languages  which 
must  be  recognized  as  established  beyond  any  reasonable  doubt 
had  already  been  discovered  before  1870,  while  later  investi- 
gations have  only  added  a  small  number  that  may  be  considered 
firmly  established,  together  with  a  great  many  more  or  less 
doubtful  collocations.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  in  the  light  of 
later  research,  we  can  now  see  that  much  of  what  was  then  con- 
sidered firm  as  a  rock  did  not  deserve  the  implicit  trust  then 
placed  in  it. 


IV. — §2.  New  Discoveries. 

This  is  ti'ue  in  the  first  place  with  regard  to  the  phonetic 
structure  ascribed  to  Proto-Aryan.  A  series  of  brilliant  dis- 
coveries made  about  the  year  1880  profoundly  modified  the 
views  of  scholars  about  the  consonantal  and  still  more  about 
the  vocalic  system  of  our  family  of  languages.  This  is  parti- 
cularly true  of  the  so-called  palatal  law.^  So  long  as  it  was 
taken  for  granted  that  Sanskrit  had  in  all  essential  points  pre- 
served the  ancient  sound  system,  while  Greek  and  the  other 
languages  represented  younger  stages,  no  one  could  explain  why 
Sanskrit  in  some  cases  had  the  palatals  c  and  j  (sounds  approxi- 
mately like  the  initial  sounds  of  E.  chicken  and  joy)  where 
the  other  languages  have  the  velar  sounds  k  and  g.  It  M-as  now 
recognized  that  so  far  from  the  distribution  of  the  two  classes 
of   sounds   in   Sanskrit   being   arbitrary,  it   followed   strict  rules, 

1  Who  was  the  discoverer  of  the  palatal  law  ?  This  has  been  hotly 
discussed,  and  as  the  law  was  in  so  far  anticipated  bj'  other  discoveries  of 
the  'seventies  as  to  be  "  in  the  air,"  it  is  perhaps  futile  to  try  to  fix  the 
paternity  on  any  single  man.  However,  it  seems  now  perfectly  clear  that 
Vilhelm  Thomsen  was  the  first  to  mention  it  in  his  lectures  (1875),  but 
unfortunately  the  full  and  able  paper  in  which  he  intended  to  lay  it  before 
the  world  was  delayed  for  a  couple  of  years  and  then  kept  in  liis  drawers 
when  he  heard  that  Johannes  Schmidt  was  preparing  a  paper  on  the  same 
subject  :  it  was  printed  in  1920  in  the  second  volume  of  his  iSamlede  AJhmid- 
linger  (from  the  original  manuscript).  Esaias  Tegner  had  found  the  law 
independently  and  had  printed  five  sheets  of  a  book  De  ariska  sprdkens 
palataler,  which  he  withdrew  when  he  found  that  Collitz  and  de  Saussure 
had  expressed  similar  views.  Karl  Verner,  too,  had  independently  arrived 
at  the  same  results ;  see  his  AJhandlinger  og  Breve,   109  fi.,  305. 


§2]  NEW  DISCOVERIES  91 

though  these  were  not  to  be  seen  from  Sanskrit  itself.  Where 
Sanskrit  a  following  the  consonant  corresponded  to  Greek  or 
Latin  o,  Sanskrit  had  velar  k  ov  g  \  where,  on  the  other  hand, 
it  corresponded  to  Greek  or  Latin  e,  Sanskrit  had  palatal  c  or  j. 
Thus  we  have,  for  instance,  c  in  Sansk.  ca,  '  and  '  =  Greek  te, 
Lat.  que,  but  k  in  kaHa  =  Lat.  coxa  ;  the  difference  between 
the  two  consonants  in  a  perfect  like  cakara,  '  have  done,'  is 
dependent  on  the  same  vowel  alternation  as  that  of  Greek 
Uloipa;  c  in  the  verb  pacati,  'cooks,'  as  against  k  in  the  sub- 
stantive pakas,  '  cooking,'  corresponds  to  the  vowels  in  Greek 
Ugei  as  against  logos,  etc.  All  this  shows  that  Sanskrit  itself 
must  once  have  had  the  vowels  e  and  o  instead  of  a  ;  before  the 
front  vowel  e  the  consonant  has  then  been  fronted  or  palatalized, 
as  ch  in  E.  chicken  is  due  to  the  following  front  vowel,  while 
k  has  been  preserved  before  o  in  cock.  Sanskrit  is  thus  shown 
to  be  in  some  important  respects  less  conservative  than  Greek, 
a  truth  which  was  destined  profoundly  to  modify  many  theories 
concerning  the  whole  family  of  languages.  As  Curtius  said, 
with  some  resentment  of  the  change  in  view  then  taking  place, 
"  Sanskrit,  once  the  oracle  of  the  rising  science  and  trusted 
blindly,  is  now  put  on  one  side  ;  instead  of  the  traditional  ex 
oriente  lux  the  saying  is  now  in  oriente  tenebrce  "  (K  97). 

The  new  views  held  in  regard  to  Aryan  vowels  also  resulted 
in  a  thorough  revision  of  the  theory  of  apophony  (ablaut).  The 
great  mass  of  Aryan  vowel  alternations  were  shown  to  form  a 
vast  and  singularly  consistent  system,  the  main  features  of  which 
may  be  gathered  from  the  following  tabulation  of  a  few  select 
Greek  examples,  arranged  into  three  columns,  each  representing 
one  ' grade  '  : 


I 

II 

III 

(1)  petomai 

p6te 

ept6mai 

(s)ekh6 

(s)6khos 

fekhon 

(2)  lelp5 

leloipa 

elipon 

(3)  peiithomai 

— 

eputh6men 

(4)  derkomai 

dedorka 

edrakon 

(5)  teino  (*tenjo)  t6nos  tatos 

It  is  outside  our  scope  to  show  how  this  scheme  gives  us  a 
natural  clue  to  the  vowels  in  such  verbs  as  E.  I  ride,  II  rode,  III 
ridden  (2),  G.  I  werde,  II  imrd,  III  geworden  (4),  or  I  binde,  II  band, 
III  gebunden  (5).  It  will  be  seen  from  the  Greek  examples  that 
grade  I  is  throughout  characterized  by  the  vowel  e  and  grade 
II  by  the  vowel  o  ;  as  for  grade  III,  the  vowel  of  I  and  II  has 
entirely  disappeared  in  (1),  where  there  is  no  vowel  between  the 


92  END  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY      [ch.  iv 

two  consonants,  and  in  (2)  and  (3),  where  the  element  found 
after  e  and  o  and  forming  a  diphthong  with  these  has  now 
become  a  full  (syllabic)  vowel  »  and  u  by  itself.  In  (4)  Sanskrit 
has  in  grade  III  a  syllabic  r  {adrQam  =  Gr.  edrakon),  while 
Greek  has  ra,  or  in  some  instances  ar,  and  Gothonic  has  ur  or  or 
according  to  the  vowel  of  the  following  syllable.  It  was  this 
fact  that  suggested  to  Brugmann  his  theory  that  in  (5)  Greek  a, 
Lat.  in,  Goth,  nn  in  the  third  grade  originated  in  syllabic  n,  and 
that  tatos  thus  stood  for  *tnt6s  ;  he  similarly  explained  Gr.  deka, 
Lat.  decern,  Gothic  iailiun,  E.  ten  from  *deL-m  with  syllabic  m. 
I  do  not  believe  that  his  theory  is  entirely  correct ;  but  so 
much  is  certain,  that  in  all  instances  grade  III  is  characterized 
by  a  reduction  of  the  vowel  that  appears  in  the  two  other 
grades  as  e  and  o,  and  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  this  reduction 
is  due  to  want  of  stress.  This  being  so,  it  becomes  impossible 
to  consider  lip  the  original  root-form,  which  in  leip  and  loip  has 
been  extended,  and  the  new  theory  of  apophony  thus  disposes 
of  the  old  theory,  based  on  the  Indian  grammarians'  view  that 
the  shortest  form  was  the  root-form,  which  was  then  raised 
through  '  guna '  and  '  vrddhi.'  This  now  is  reversed,  and  the 
fuller  form  is  shown  to  be  the  oldest,  which  in  some  cases  was 
shortened  according  to  a  process  paralleled  in  many  living 
languages.  Bopp  was  right  in  his  rejection  of  Grimm's  theory 
of  an  inner,  significatory  reason  for  apophony,  as  apophony  is 
now  shown  to  have  been  due  to  a  mechanical  cause,  though  a 
different  one  from  that  suggested  by  Bopp  (see  above,  p.  53)  ; 
and  Grimm  was  also  wrong  in  another  respect,  because  apophony 
is  found  from  the  first  in  noun-formations  as  well  as  in  verbs, 
where  Grimm  believed  it  to  have  been  instituted  to  indicate 
tense  differences,  with  which  it  had  originally  nothing  to  do. 
Apophony  even  appears  in  other  syllables  than  the  root  syllable  ; 
the  new  view  thus  quite  naturally  paved  the  way  for  skepticism 
with  regard  to  the  old  doctrine  that  Aryan  roots  were  neces- 
sarily monosyllabic ;  and  scholars  soon  began  to  admit  dissyllabic 
'  bases '  in  place  of  the  old  roots  ;  instead  of  lip,  the  earliest 
accessible  form  thus  came  to  be  something  like  leipo  or  hipe. 
In  this  way  the  new  vowel  system  had  far-reaching  consequences 
and  made  linguists  look  upon  many  problems  in  a  new  light.  It 
should  be  noted,  however,  that  the  mechanical  explanation  of 
apophony  from  difference  in  accent  applies  only  to  grade  III,  in 
contradistinction  to  grades  I  and  II ;  the  reason  of  the  alter- 
nation between  the  e  of  I  and  the  o  of  II  is  by  no  means  clear. 
The  investigations  leading  to  the  discovery  of  the  palatal 
law  and  the  new  theory  of  apophony  were  only  a  part  of  the 
immense  labour  of  a  number  of  able  linguists  in  the  'seventies 


§2]  NEW  DISCOVERIES  98 

and  'eighties,  which  cleared  up  many  obscure  points  in  Aryan 
phonology  and  morphology.  One  of  the  most  famous  dis- 
coveries was  that  of  the  Dane  Karl  Verner,  that  a  whole  series 
of  consonant  alternations  in  the  old  Gothonic  languages  was 
dependent  on  accent,  and  (more  remarkable  still)  on  the  pri- 
meval accent,  preserved  in  its  oldest  form  in  Sanskrit  only,  and 
differing  from  that  of  modern  Gothonic  languages  in  resting  in 
some  instances  on  the  ending  and  in  others  on  the  root.  When 
it  was  realized  that  the  fact  that  German  has  t  in  vater,  but  d 
in  bruder,  was  due  to  a  different  accentuation  of  the  two  words 
three  or  four  thousand  years  ago,  or  that  the  difference  between 
s  and  r  in  E.  was  and  were  was  connected  with  the  fact  that  per- 
fect singulars  in  Sanskrit  are  stressed  on  the  root,  but  plurals  on 
the  ending,  this  served  not  only  to  heighten  respect  for  the 
linguistic  science  that  was  able  to  demonstrate  such  truths,  but 
also  to  increase  the  feeling  that  the  world  of  sounds  was  subject 
to  strict  laws  comparable  to  those  of  natural  science. 


IV.— §  3.  Phonetic  Laws  and  Analogy. 

The  '  blind '  operation  of  phonetic  laws  became  the  chief 
tenet  of  a  new  school  of  '  young-grammarians  '  or  '  junggram- 
matiker  '  (Brugraann,  Delbriick,  Osthoff,  Paul  and  others),  who 
somewhat  noisily  flourished  their  advance  upon  earlier  linguists 
and  justly  roused  the  anger  not  only  of  their  own  teachers, 
including  Curtius,  but  also  of  fellow-students  like  Johannes 
Schmidt  and  Collitz.  For  some  years  a  fierce  discussion  took 
place  on  the  principles  of  linguistic  science,  in  which  young- 
grammarians  tried  to  prove  deductively  the  truth  of  their 
favourite  thesis  that  "  Sound-laws  admit  of  no  exceptions " 
(first,  it  seems,  enounced  by  Leskien),  Osthoff  wrongly  main- 
tained that  sound  changes  belonged  to  physiology  and  analogical 
change  to  psychology ;  but  though  that  distribution  of  the  two 
kinds  of  change  to  two  different  domains  was  untenable,  the 
distinction  in  itself  was  important  and  proved  a  valuable, 
though  perhaps  sometimes  too  easy  instrument  in  the  hands 
of  the  historical  grammarian.  It  was  quite  natural  that  those 
who  insisted  on  undeviating  phonetic  laws  should  turn  their 
attention  to  those  cases  in  which  forms  appeared  that  did  not 
conform  to  these  laws,  and  try  to  explain  them  ;  and  thus  they 
inevitably  were  led  to  recognize  the  immense  importance  of  ana- 
logical formations  in  the  economy  of  all  languages.  Such  forma- 
tions had  long  been  known,  but  little  attention  had  been  paid 
to  them,  and  they  were  generally  termed  '  false  analogies  '  and 
looked  upon  as  corruptions  or  inorganic  formations  found  only 


94  END   OF  NINETEENTH   CENTURY       [cii.  iv 

or  chiefly  in  a  degenerate  age,  in  which  the  true  meaning  and 
composition  of  the  old  forms  was  no  longer  understood.  Men 
like  Curtius  were  scandalized  at  the  younger  school  explaining 
so  many  even  of  the  noble  forms  of  ancient  Greek  as  due  to  this 
upstart  force  of  analogy.  His  opponents  contended  that  the 
name  of  '  false  analogy  '  was  wrong  and  misleading  :  the  analogy 
in  itself  was  perfect  an^i  was  handled  with  unerring  instinct  in 
each  case.  They  likewise  pointed  out  that  analogical  formations, 
so  far  Irom  being  perversions  of  a  late  age,  really  represented  one 
of  the  vital  principles  of  language,  without  which  it  could  never 
have  come  into  existence. 

One  of  the  first  to  take  the  new  point  of  view  and  to  explain 
it  clearly  was  Hermann  Paul.  I  quote  from  an  early  article 
(as  translated  by  Sweet,  CP  112)  the  following  passages,  which 
really  struck  a  new  note  in  linguistic  theory  : 

"  There  is  one  simple  fact  which  should  never  be  left  out  of 
sight,  namely,  that  even  in  the  parent  Indogermanic  language, 
long  before  its  split-up,  there  were  no  longer  any  roots,  stems, 
and  suffixes,  but  only  ready-inade  words,  which  were  employed 
without  the  slightest  thought  of  their  composite  nature.  And 
it  is  only  of  such  ready-made  words  that  the  store  is  composed 
from  which  everyone  draws  when  he  speaks.  He  has  no  stock 
of  stems  and  terminations  at  his  disposal  from  which  he  could 
construct  the  form  required  for  each  separate  occasion.  Not 
that  he  must  necessarily  have  heard  and  learnt  by  heart  every 
form  he  uses.  This  would,  in  fact,  be  impossible.  He  is,  on  the 
contrary,  able  of  himself  to  form  cases  of  nouns,  tenses  of  verbs,  etc., 
which  he  has  either  never  heard  or  else  not  noticed  specially  ; 
but,  as  there  is  no  combining  of  stem  and  suffix,  this  can  only 
be  done  on  the  pattern  of  the  other  ready-made  combinations 
which  he  has  learnt  from  his  fellows.  These  latter  are  first 
learnt  one  by  one,  and  then  gradually  associated  into  groups 
which  correspond  to  the  grammatical  categories,  but  are  never 
clearly  conceived  as  such  without  special  training.  This  grouping 
not  only  greatly  aids  the  memory,  but  also  makes  it  possible  to 
produce  other  combinations.     And  this  is  what  we  call  analogy." 

"  It  is,  therefore,  clear  that,  while  speaking,  everj^one  is 
incessantly  producing  analogical  forms.  Reproduction  by  memory 
and  new -formation  by  means  of  association  are  its  two  indis- 
pensable factors.  It  is  a  mistake  to  assume  a  language  as  given 
in  grammar  and  dictionary,  that  is,  the  whole  body  of  possible 
words  and  forms,  as  something  concrete,  and  to  forget  that  it 
is  nothing  but  an  abstraction  devoid  of  reality,  and  that  the 
actual  language  exists  only  in  the  individual,  from  whom  it  cannot 
be  separated  even  in  scientific  investigation,  if  we  will  understand 


§3]  PHONETIC  LAWS   AND   ANALOGY  95 

its  nature  and  development.  To  comprehend  the  existence  of 
each  separate  spoken  form,  we  must  not  ask  '  Is  it  current  in  the 
language  '^  *  or  '  Is  it  conformable  to  the  laws  of  the  language 
as  deduced  by  the  grammarians  ?  '  but  '  Has  he  who  has  just 
employed  it  previously  had  it  in  his  memory,  or  has  he  formed 
it  himself  for  the  first  time,  and,  if  so,  according  to  what  ana- 
logy ? '  When,  for  instance,  anyone  employs  the  plural  milben 
in  Grerman,  it  may  be  that  he  has  learnt  it  from  others,  or  else 
that  he  has  only  heard  the  singular  milbe,  but  knows  that  such 
words  as  lerche,  schwalbe,  etc.,  form  their  plural  lerchen,  etc.,  so 
that  the  association  milbe-milben  is  unconsciously  suggested  to 
him.  He  may  also  have  heard  the  plural  milben,  but  remembers 
it  so  imperfectly  that  he  would  forget  it  entirely  were  it  not 
associated  in  his  mind  with  a  series  of  similar  forms  which  help 
him  to  recall  it.  It  is,  therefore,  often  difficult  to  determine  the 
share  memory  and  creative  fancy  have  had  in  each  separate 
case." 

Linguists  thus  set  about  it  seriously  to  think  of  language  in 
terms  of  speaking  individuals,  who  have  learnt  their  mother- 
tongue  in  the  ordinary  way,  and  who  now  employ  it  in  their 
daily  intercourse  with  other  men  and  women,  without  in  each 
separate  case  knowing  what  they  owe  to  others  and  what  they 
have  to  create  on  the  spur  of  the  moment.  Just  as  Sokrates 
fetched  philosophy  down  from  the  skies,  so  also  now  linguists 
fetched  words  and  forms  down  from  vocabularies  and  grammars 
and  placed  them  where  their  natural  home  is,  in  the  minds  and 
on  the  lips  of  ordinary  men  who  are  neither  lexicographers  nor 
grammarians,  but  who  nevertheless  master  their  language  with 
sufficient  ease  and  correctness  for  all  ordinary  purposes.  Linguists 
now  were  confronted  with  some  general  problems  which  had  not 
greatly  troubled  their  predecessors  (with  the  solitary  exception 
of  Bredsdorff,  whose  work  was  entirely  overlooked),  namely, 
What  are  the  causes  of  changes  in  language  ?  How  are  they 
brought  about,  and  how  should  they  be  classified  ?  Many 
articles  on  these  questions  appeared  in  linguistic  periodicals  about 
the  year  1880,  but  the  profoundest  and  fullest  treatment  was 
found  in  a  masterly  book  by  H.  Paul,  Prinzipien  der  Sprack- 
geschichte,  the  first  edition  of  which  (1880)  exercised  a  very  con- 
siderable influence  on  linguistic  thought,  while  the  subsequent 
editions  were  constantly  enlarged  and  improved  so  as  to  contain 
a  wealth  of  carefully  sifted  material  to  illustrate  the  various  pro- 
cesses of  linguistic  change.  It  should  also  be  noted  that  Paul 
paid  more  and  more  attention  to  syntax,  and  that  this  part  of 
grammar,  which  had  been  neglected  by  Bopp  and  Schleicher 
and  their  contemporaries,  was  about  this  time  taken  up  by  some 


96  END  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY      [ch.  iv 

of  the  leading  linguists,  who  showed  that  the  comparative  and 
historical  method  was  capable  of  throwing  a  flood  of  light  on 
syntax  no  less  than  on  morphology  (Delbriick,  Ziemer). 


IV.— §4.  General  Tendencies. 

While  linguists  in  the  'eighties  were  taking  up,  as  we  have 
scon,  a  great  many  questions  of  vast  general  importance  that  had 
not  been  treated  by  the  older  generation,  on  the  other  hand  they 
were  losing  interest  in  some  of  the  problems  that  had  occupied 
their  predecessors.  This  was  the  case  with  the  question  of  the 
ultimate  origin  of  grammatical  endings.  So  late  as  1869  Benfey 
included  among  Bopp's  '  brilliant  discoveries  '  his  theory  that 
the  s  of  the  aorist  and  of  the  future  was  derived  from  the  verb 
as,  '  to  be,'  and  that  the  endings  of  the  Latin  imperfect  -bam 
and  future  -bo  were  from  the  synonymous  verb  fa  =  Sanskrit 
bhu  (Gesch  377),  and  the  next  year  Raumer  reckons  the  same 
theories  among  Bopp's  '  most  important  discoveries.'  But  soon 
after  this  we  see  that  speculations  of  this  kind  somehow  go  out 
of  fashion.  One  of  the  last  books  to  indulge  in  them  to  any 
extent  is  Scherer's  once  famous  Zur  Oeschichte  der  deutschen 
Sprache  (2nd  ed.,  1878),  in  the  eighth  chapter  of  which  the  writer 
disports  himself  among  primitive  roots,  endings,  prepositions 
and  pronouns,  which  he  identifies  and  differentiates  with  such 
extreme  boldness  and  confidence  in  his  own  wild  fancies  that 
a  sober-minded  man  of  the  twentieth  century  cannot  but  feel 
dazed  and  giddy.  The  ablest  linguists  of  the  new  school  simply 
left  these  theories  aside:  no  new  explanations  of  the  same 
description  were  advanced,  and  the  old  ones  were  not  sub- 
stantiated by  the  ascertained  phenomena  of  living  languages. 
So  much  was  found  in  these  of  the  most  absorbing  interest  that 
scholars  ceased  to  care  for  what  might  lie  behind  Proto-Aryan  ; 
some  even  went  so  far  as  to  deprecate  in  strong  expressions  any 
attempts  at  what  they  termed  '  glottogonic  '  theories.  To  these 
matter-of-fact  linguists  all  speculations  as  to  the  ultimate  origin 
of  language  were  futile  and  nebulous,  a  verdict  which  might  be 
in  no  small  degree  justified  by  much  of  what  had  been  written 
on  the  subject  by  quasi-philosophers  and  quasi-linguists.  The 
aversion  to  these  questions  was  shown  as  early  as  1866,  when 
La  Society  de  Linguistique  was  founded  in  Paris.  Section  2  of 
the  statutes  of  the  Society  expressly  states  that  "  La  Societe 
n'admet  aucune  communication  concernant,  soit  I'origine  du 
langage,  soit  la  creation  d'une  langue  universelle  " — both  of  them 
questions  Avhich,  as  they  can  be  treated  in  a  scientific  spirit, 
should  not  bo  left  exclusively  to  dilettanti. 


§4]  GENERAL  TENDENCIES  97 

The  last  forty  j^ears  have  Avitnessed  an  extraordinary  activity 
on  the  part  of  scholars  in  investigating  all  domains  of  the  Aryan 
languages  in  the  light  of  the  new  general  views  and  by  the  aid 
of  the  methods  that  have  now  become  common  property. 
Phonological  investigations  have  no  doubt  had  the  lion's  share 
and  have  to  a  great  extent  been  signalized  by  that  real  insight 
into  physiological  phonetics  which  had  been  wanting  in  earlier 
linguists  ;  but  very  much  excellent  work  has  also  been  done  in 
morphology,  syntax  and  semantics  ;  and  in  all  these  domains 
much  has  been  gained  by  considering  words  not  as  mere  isolated 
imits,  but  as  parts  of  sentences,  or,  better,  of  connected  speech. 
In  phonetics  more  and  more  attention  has  been  paid  to  sentence 
phonetics  and  '  sandhi  phenomena  ' ;  the  heightened  interest  in 
everytliing  concerning  '  accent '  (stress  and  pitch)  has  also  led 
to  investigations  of  sentence-stress  and  sentence-melody ;  the 
intimate  connexion  between  forms  and  their  use  or  function  in 
the  sentence,  in  other  words  their  syntax,  has  been  more  and 
more  recognized  ;  and  finally,  if  semantics  (the  study  of  the  signi- 
fications of  words)  has  become  a  real  science  instead  of  being  a 
curiosity  shop  of  isolated  specimens,  this  has  only  been  rendered 
possible  through  seeing  words  as  connected  with  other  words  to 
form  complete  utterances.  But  this  change  of  attitude  could 
not  have  been  brought  about  unless  linguists  had  studied  texts 
in  the  different  languages  to  a  far  greater  extent  than  had  been 
done  in  previous  periods  ;  thus,  naturally,  the  antagonism  formerly 
often  felt  between  the  linguistic  and  the  purely  philological  study 
of  the  same  language  has  tended  to  disappear,  and  many  scholars 
have  produced  work  both  in  their  particular  branch  of  linguistics 
and  in  the  corresponding  philology.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that 
this  development  has  been  profitable  to  both  domains  of  scientific 
activity. 

Another  beneficial  change  is  the  new  attitude  taken  with 
regard  to  the  study  of  living  speech.  The  science  of  linguistics 
had  long  stood  in  the  sign  of  Cancer  and  had  been  constantly 
looking  backwards — to  its  own  great  loss.  Now,  with  the  greater 
stress  laid  on  i)honetics  and  on  the  psychology  of  language,  the 
necessity  of  observing  the  phenomena  of  actual  everyday  speech 
was  more  clearly  perceived.  Among  pioneers  in  this  respect  I 
must  specially  mention  Henry  Sweet ;  now  there  is  a  steadily 
growing  interest  in  living  speech  as  the  necessary  foundation  of 
all  general  theorizing.     And  with  interest  comes  knowledge. 

It  is  outside  the  purpose  of  this  volume  to  give  the  history 
of  linguistic  study  during  the  last  forty  years  in  the  same  way 
as  I  have  attempted  to  give  it  for  the  period  before  1880,  and  I 
must   therefore   content   myself   with   a   few   brief   rcmajks   on 

7 


98      END  OF  NINETEENTH  CENTURY   [ch.  iv 

general  tendencies.  I  even  withstand  the  temptation  to  try  and 
characterize  the  two  greatest  works  on  general  linguistics  that 
have  appeared  during  this  period,  those  by  Georg  v.  d.  Gabelentz 
and  Wilhelm  Wundt ;  important  and  in  many  ways  excellent 
as  they  are,  they  have  not  exercised  the  same  influence  on  con- 
temporary linguistic  research  as  some  of  their  predecessors. 
Personally  I  owe  incomparably  much  more  to  the  former  than 
to  the  latter,  who  is  much  less  of  a  linguist  than  of  a  psychologist 
and  whose  pages  seem  to  me  often  richer  in  words  than  in  fertil- 
izing ideas.  As  for  the  rest,  I  can  give  only  a  bare  alphabetical 
list  of  some  of  the  writers  who  during  this  period  have  dealt  with 
the  more  general  problems  of  linguistic  change  or  linguistic 
theory,  and  must  not  attempt  any  appreciation  of  their  works  : 
Bally,  Baudouin  de  Courtenay,  Bloomfield,  Breal  Delbriick,  van 
Ginneken,  Hale,  Henrj'-,  Hirt,  Axel  Kock,  Meillet  Meringer,  Noreen, 
Oertel,  Pedersen,  Sandfeld  (Jensen),  de  Saussure,  Schuchardt, 
Sechehaye,  Streitberg,  Sturtevant,  Siitterlin,  Sweet,  Uhlenbeck, 
Vossler,  Wechssler.  In  the  following  parts  of  my  work  there 
will  be  many  opportunities  of  mentioning  their  views,  especially 
when  I  disagree  with  them,  for  I  am  afraid  it  will  be  impossible 
always  to  indicate  what  I  owe  to  their  suggestions. 

In  the  history  of  linguistic  science  we  have  seen  in  one  period 
a  tendency  to  certain  large  sjmtheses  (the  classification  of 
languages  into  isolating,  agglutinative  and  flexional,  and  the 
corresponding  theory  of  three  periods  with  its  corollary  touching 
the  origin  of  flexional  endings),  and  we  have  seen  how  these 
syntheses  were  later  discredited,  though  never  actually  disproved, 
linguists  contenting  themselves  with  detailed  comparisons  and 
explanations  of  single  words,  forms  or  sounds  without  troubling 
about  their  ultimate  origin  or  about  the  evolutionary  tendencies 
of  the  whole  system  or  structure  of  language.  The  question  may 
therefore  be  raised,  were  Bopp  and  Schleicher  wrong  in  attempt- 
ing these  large  syntheses  ?  It  would  appear  from  the  expressions 
of  some  modern  linguists  that  they  thought  that  any  such  com- 
prehensive generalization  or  any  glottogonic  theory  were  in  itself 
of  evil.  But  this  can  never  be  admitted.  Science,  of  its  very 
nature,  aims  at  larger  and  larger  generalizations,  more  and  more 
comprehensive  formulas,  so  as  finally  to  bring  about  that  "  uni- 
fication of  knowledge  "  of  which  Herbert  Spencer  speaks.  It  was 
therefore  quite  right  of  the  early  linguists  to  propound  those 
great  questions  ;  and  their  failure  to  solve  them  in  a  way  that 
could  satisfj'  the  stricter  demands  of  a  later  generation  should 
not  be  charged  too  heavily  against  them.  It  was  also  quite 
right  of  thf^  moderns  to  reject  their  premature  solutions  (though 
this  Avas  often   done  Avithout    any  adequate    examination),   but 


§4]  GENERAL   TENDENCIES  99 

it  was  decidedly  wrong  to  put  the  questions  out  of  court  alto- 
gether.^ These  great  questions  have  to  be  put  over  and  over 
again,  till  a  complete  solution  is  found  ;  and  the  refusal  to  face 
these  difficulties  has  produced  a  certain  barrenness  in  modern 
linguistics,  which  must  strike  any  impartial  observer,  however 
much  he  admits  the  fertility  of  the  science  in  detailed  investi- 
gations. Breadth  of  vision  is  not  conspicuous  in  modern 
linguistics,  and  to  my  mind  this  lack  is  chiefly  due  to  the  fact 
that  linguists  have  neglected  all  problems  connected  with  a 
valuation  of  language.  What  is  the  criterion  by  which  one  word 
or  one  form  should  be  preferred  to  another  ?  (most  linguists 
refuse  to  deal  with  such  questions  of  preference  or  of  correctness 
of  speech).  Are  the  changes  that  we  see  gradually  taking  place 
in  languages  to  be  considered  as  on  the  whole  beneficial  or  the 
opposite  ?  (most  linguists  pooh-pooh  such  questions).  Would  it 
be  possible  to  construct  an  international  language  by  which 
persons  in  different  countries  could  easily  communicate  with 
one  another  ?  (most  linguists  down  to  the  present  day  have 
looked  upon  all  who  favour  such  ideas  as  visionaries  and  Uto- 
pians). It  is  my  firm  conviction  that  such  questions  as  these 
admit  of  really  scientific  treatment  and  should  be  submitted  to 
serious  discussion.  But  before  tackling  those  of  them  which 
fall  within  the  plan  of  this  work,  it  will  be  well  to  deal  with  some 
fundamental  facts  of  what  is  popularly  called  the  '  life  '  of  language, 
and  first  of  all  with  the  manner  in  which  a  child  acquires  its 
mother-tongue.  For  as  language  exists  only  in  individuals  and 
means  some  specific  activities  of  human  beings  which  are  not 
inborn,  but  have  to  be  learnt  by  each  of  them  separately  from 
his  fellow-beings,  it  is  important  to  examine  somewhat  in  detail 
how  this  interaction  of  the  individual  and  of  the  surrounding 
society  is  brought  about.     This,  then,  will  occupy  us  in  Book  II, 

^  "  Ea  ist  besger,  bei  solchen  versuchen  zu  irren  als  gar  nicht  darQber 
nachzudenken,"  Curtius,  K  145. 


BOOK   II 
THE     CHILD 


CHAPTER  V 
SOUNDS 

§  1.  From  Screaming  to  Talking.  §  2.  First  Soimda.  §  3.  Sound-laws  of 
the  Next  Stage.  §  4.  Groups  of  Sounds.  §  5.  Mutilations  and 
Reduplications.     §  6.  CoiTection.     §  7.  Tone. 

V. — §1.  From  Screaming  to  Talking. 

A  Danish  philosopher  has  said  :  "  In  his  whole  life  man  achieves 
nothing  so  great  and  so  wonderful  as  what  he  achieved  when  he 
learnt  to  talk."  When  Darwin  was  asked  in  which  three  years 
of  his  life  a  man  learnt  most,  he  said  :  "  The  first  three." 

A  child's  linguistic  development  covers  three  periods — the 
screaming  time,  the  crowing  or  babbling  time,  and  the  talking 
time.  But  the  last  is  a  long  one,  and  must  again  be  divided  into 
two  periods — that  of  the  "  little  language,"  the  child's  own 
language,  and  that  of  the  common  language  or  language  of  the 
community.  In  the  former  the  child  is  linguistically  an  indi- 
vidualist, in  the  latter  he  is  more  and  more  socialized. 

Of  the  screaming  time  little  need  be  said.  A  child's  scream 
is  not  uttered  primarily  as  a  means  of  conveying  anything  to 
others,  and  so  far  is  not  properly  to  be  called  speech.  But  if 
from  the  child's  side  a  scream  is  not  a  wajj"  of  telling  anything, 
its  elders  may  still  read  something  in  it  and  hurry  to  relieve  the 
trouble.  And  if  the  child  comes  to  remark — as  it  soon  will — 
that  whenever  it  cries  someone  comes  and  brings  it  something 
pleasant,  if  only  company,  it  will  not  be  long  till  it  makes  use  of 
this  instrument  whenever  it  is  uneasy  or  wants  something.  The 
scream,  which  was  at  first  a  reflex  action,  is  now  a  voluntary  action. 
And  many  parents  have  discovered  that  the  child  has  learnt  to 
use  its  power  of  screaming  to  exercise  a  t^Tannical  power  over 
them — so  that  they  have  had  to  walk  up  and  down  all  night  with 
a  screaming  child  that  prefers  this  way  of  spending  the  night  to 
lying  quietly  in  its  cradle.  The  onlj'  course  is  brutally  to  let  the 
baby  scream  till  it  is  tired,  and  persist  in  never  letting  it  get  its 
desire  because  it  screams  for  it,  but  only  because  what  it  desires 
is  good  for  it.  The  child  learns  its  lesson,  and  a  scream  is  once 
more  what  it  was  at  first,  an  involuntary,  irresistible  result  of  the 
fact  that  something  is  wrong. 

103 


104.  SOUNDS  [CH.  V 

Screaming  has,  however,  another  side.  It  is  of  plij'siological 
vahie  as  an  exercise  of  all  the  muscles  and  ajipliances  whicli  are 
afterwards  to  be  called  into  play  for  speech  and  song.  Nurses 
say — and  there  may  be  something  in  it — that  the  child  who  screams 
loudest  as  a  baby  becomes  the  best  singer  later. 

Babbling  time  produces  pleasanter  sounds  which  are  more 
adapted  for  the  purposes  of  speech.  Cooing,  crowing,  babbling — 
i.e.  uttering  meaningless  sounds  and  series  of  sounds — is  a  delightful 
exercise  like  sprawling  with  outstretched  arms  and  legs  or  trying 
to  move  the  tiny  fingers.  It  has  been  well  said  that  for  a  long 
time  a  child's  dearest  toy  is  its  tongue — that  is,  of  course,  not  the 
tongue  only,  but  the  other  organs  of  speech  as  well,  especially 
the  lips  and  vocal  chords.  At  first  the  movements  of  these  organs 
are  as  uncontrolled  as  those  of  the  arms,  but  gradually  they  become 
more  systematic,  and  the  boy  knows  what  sound  he  wishes  to 
utter  and  is  in  a  position  to  produce  it  exactly. 

First,  then,  come  single  vowels  or  vowels  with  a  single  consonant 
preceding  them,  as  la,  ra,  Id,  etc.,  though  a  baby's  sounds  cannot 
be  identified  with  any  of  om's  or  written  down  with  our  letters. 
For,  though  the  head  and  consequently  the  mouth  capacit}'  is 
disprojiortionally  great  in  an  infant  and  grows  more  rapidly  than 
its  limbs,  there  is  still  a  great  difiference  between  its  mouth  capacity 
and  that  required  to  utter  normal  speech-sounds.  I  have  else- 
where (PhG,  p.  81  ff.)  given  the  results  of  a  series  of  measurings 
of  the  jaw  in  children  and  adults  and  discussed  the  importance 
of  these  figures  for  phonetic  theory  :  while  there  is  no  growth  of 
any  importance  during  the  talking  period  (for  a  child  of  five  may 
have  the  same  jaw-length  as  a  man  of  thirty-seven),  the  growth 
is  enormous  during  the  first  months  of  a  child's  life  :  in  the  case 
of  my  own  child,  from  45  mm.  a  few  daj^s  after  birth  to  60  mm. 
at  three  months  old  and  75  mm.  at  eleven  months,  while  the 
average  of  grown-up  men  is  99  mm.  and  of  women  93  mm.  The 
consequence  is  that  the  sounds  of  the  baby  are  different  from 
ours,  and  that  even  when  they  resemble  ours  the  mechanism  of 
production  may  be  different  from  the  normal  one  ;  when  my  son 
during  the  first  weeks  said  something  like  la,  I  was  able  to  see 
distinctly  that  the  tip  of  the  tongue  was  not  at  all  in  the  position 
required  for  our  /.  This  want  of  congruence  between  the  acoustic 
manners  of  operation  in  the  infant  and  the  adult  no  doubt  gives 
us  the  key  to  many  of  the  difficulties  that  have  puzzled  previous 
observers  of  small  children. 

Babbling  or  crowing  begins  not  earlier  than  the  third  week ; 
it  may  be,  not  till  the  seventh  or  eighth  week.  The  first  sound 
exercises  are  to  be  regarded  as  muscular  exercises  pure  and  simple, 
as  is  clear  from  the  fact  that  deaf-mutes  amuse  themselves  with 


§1]  FROM  SCREAMING  TO  TALKING  105 

them,  although  they  cannot  themselves  hear  them.  But  the 
moment  comes  when  tlie  hearing  child  finds  a  pleasure  in  hearing 
its  own  sounds,  and  a  most  important  step  is  taken  when  the  little 
one  begins  to  hear  a  resemblance  between  the  sounds  uttered 
by  its  mother  or  nurse  and  its  own.  The  mother  will  naturally 
answer  the  baby's  syllables  by  repeating  the  same,  and  when  the 
baby  recognizes  the  likeness,  it  secures  an  inexhaustible  source 
of  pleasure,  and  after  some  time  reaches  the  next  stage,  when  it 
tries  itself  to  imitate  what  is  said  to  it  (generally  towards  the 
close  of  the  first  year).  The  value  of  this  exercise  cannot  be 
over-estimated  :  the  more  that  parents  understand  how  to  play 
this  game  with  the  baby — of  saying  something  and  letting  the 
baby  say  it  after,  however  meaningless  the  syllable-sequences  that 
they  make — the  better  will  be  the  foundation  for  the  child's  later 
acquisition  and  command  of  language. 


v.— §  2.  First  Sounds, 

It  is  generally  said  that  the  order  in  which  the  child  learns 
to  utter  the  different  sounds  depends  on  their  difficulty  :  the  easiest 
sounds  are  produced  first.  That  is  no  doubt  true  in  the  main  ; 
but  when  we  go  into  details  we  find  that  different  writers  bring 
forward  lists  of  sounds  in  different  order.  All  are  agreed,  however, 
that  among  the  consonants  the  labials,  j),  b  and  7/i,*are  early  sounds, 
if  not  the  earliest.  The  explanation  has  been  given  that  the  child 
can  see  the  working  of  his  mother's  lips  in  these  sounds  and  there- 
fore imitates  her  movements.  This  implies  far  too  much  conscious 
thought  on  the  part  of  the  baby,  who  utters  his  '  ma  '  or  '  mo  ' 
before  he  begins  to  imitate  anything  said  to  him  by  his  surroundings. 
Moreover,  it  has  been  pointed  out  that  the  child's  attention  is 
hardly  ever  given  to  its  mother's  mouth,  but  is  steadily  fixed 
on  her  eyes.  The  real  reason  is  probably  that  the  labial  muscles 
nsed  to  produce  b  or  tn  are  the  same  that  the  baby  has  exercised 
in  sucking  the  breast  or  the  bottle.  It  would  be  interesting  to 
learn  if  blind  children  also  produce  the  labial  sounds  first. 

Along  with  the  labial  sounds  the  baby  produces  many  other 
sounds — vowel  and  consonant — and  in  these  cases  one  is  certain 
that  it  has  not  been  able  to  see  how  these  sounds  are  produced 
by  its  mother.  Even  in  the  case  of  the  labials  we  know  that 
what  distinguishes  m  from  6,  the  lowering  of  the  soft  palate,  and 
b  from  p,  the  vibrations  of  the  vocal  chords,  is  invisible.  Some 
of  the  sounds  produced  by  means  of  the  tongue  may  be  too  hard 
to  pronounce  till  the  muscles  of  the  tongue  have  been  exercised 
in  consequence  of  the  child  having  begun  to  eat  more  solid  things 
than  milk. 


106  SOUNDS  [CH.  V 

By  the  end  of  the  first  year  the  number  of  sounds  which  the 
little  babbler  has  mastered  is  already  considerable,  and  he  loves 
to  combine  long  scries  of  the  same  syllables,  dadadada  .  .  ., 
nenenene  .  .  .  ,  bygnbygnbygn  .  .  .  ,  etc.  That  is  a  game  which 
need  not  even  cease  when  the  child  is  able  to  talk  actual  language. 
It  is  strange  that  among  an  infant's  sounds  one  can  often  detect 
sounds — for  instance  k,  g,  h,  and  uvular  r — which  the  child  will  find 
difficulty  in  producing  afterwards  when  they  occur  in  real  words, 
or  which  may  be  unknown  to  the  language  which  it  will  some  day 
speak.  The  explanation  lies  probably  in  the  difference  between 
doing  a  thing  in  play  or  without  a  plan — when  it  is  immaterial 
which  movement  (sound)  is  made — and  doing  the  same  thing  of 
fixed  intention  when  this  sound,  and  this  sound  only,  is  required, 
at  a  definite  point  in  the  syllable,  and  with  this  or  that  particular 
sound  before  and  after.  Accordingly,  great  difficulties  come  to 
be  encountered  when  the  child  begins  more  consciously^  and  syste- 
maticall}'  to  imitate  his  elders.  Some  sounds  come  without  effort 
and  may  be  used  incessantly,  to  the  detriment  of  others  which 
the  child  may  have  been  able  previously  to  produce  in  play  ;  and 
a  time  even  comes  when  the  stock  of  sounds  actually  diminishes, 
while  particular  sounds  acquire  greater  precision.  Dancing  masters, 
singing  masters  and  gymnastic  teachers  have  similar  experiences. 
After  some  lessons  the  child  may  seem  more  awkward  than  it  was 
before  the  lessons  began. 

The  '  little  language  '  which  the  child  makes  for  itself  by 
imperfect  imitation  of  the  sounds  of  its  elders  seems  so  arbitrary 
that  it  may  well  be  compared  to  the  child's  first  rude  drawings 
of  men  and  animals.  A  Danish  boy  named  Gustav  (1.6)^  called 
himself  [dodado]  and  turned  the  name  Karoline  into  [nnn].  Other 
Danish  children  made  skammel  into  [gramn]  or  [gap],  elefant  into 
fvat],  Karen  into  [gaja],  etc.  A  few  examples  from  English 
children:  Hilary  M.  (1.6)  called  Ireland  (her  sister)  [a'ni], 
Gordon  M.  (1.10)  called  Millicent  (his  sister)  [dadu].  Tony  E. 
(1.11)  called  his  playmate  Sheila  [dubabud]. 

v.— §  3.  Sound-laws  of  the  Next  Stage. 

As  the  child  gets  away  from  the  peculiarities  of  his  individual 
'  little  language,'  his  speech  becomes  more  regular,  and  a  linguist 
can  in  many  cases  see  reasons  for  his  distortions  of  normal  w^ords. 
When  he  replaces  one  sound  by  another  there  is  always  some 
common  element  in  the  formation  of  the  two  sounds,  Avhich  causes 

^  In  this  book  the  age  of  a  child  is  indicated  by  stating  the  number  of 
years  and  months  completed:  1.6  thus  means  "in  the  seventh  month  of 
the  second  year,"  etc. 


§3]         SOUND-LAWS   OF  THE   NEXT   STAGE         107 

a  kindred  impression  on  the  ear,  though  tve  may  have  difficulty 
in  detecting  it  because  we  are  so  accustomed  to  noticing  the 
difference.  There  is  generally  a  certain  system  in  the  sound 
substitutions  of  children,  and  in  many  instances  we  are  justified 
in  speaking  of  '  strictly  observed  sound-laws.'  Let  us  now  look 
at  some  of  these. 

Children  in  all  countries  tend  to  substitute  [t]  for  [k] :  both 
sounds  are  produced  by  a  complete  stoppage  of  the  breath  for  the 
moment  by  the  tongue,  the  only  difference  being  that  it  is  the 
back  of  the  tongue  which  acts  in  one  case,  and  the  tip  of 
the  tongue  in  the  other.  A  child  who  substitutes  t  for  k  will 
also  substitute  d  for  g ;  if  he  says  '  tat '  for  '  cat '  he  will  say 
'  do  '  for  '  go.' 

i?  is  a  difficult  sound.  Hilary  M.  (2.0)  has  no  r's  in  her  speech. 
Initially  they  become  w,  as  in  [wau]  for  'run,'  medially  between 
vowels  they  become  I,  as  in  [veli,  beli]  for  '  very,  berry,'  in  conso- 
nantal combinations  they  are  lost,  as  in  [kai,  bA/"]  for  '  cry, 
brush.'  Tony  E.  (1.10  to  3.0)  for  medial  r  between  vowels  first 
substituted  d,  as  in  [vedi]  for  '  very,'  and  later  g  [vegi] ;  similarly 
in  [mu-gi]  for  '  Muriel,'  [tsegi]  for  '  carry  '  ;  he  often  dropped 
initial  r,  e.g.  oom  for  'room.'  It  is  not  unusual  for  children  who 
use  w  for  r  in  most  combinations  to  say  [t/]  for  tr  and  [d5]  for  dr, 
as  in  '  chee,'  '  jawer  '  for  'tree,'  'drawer.'  This  illustrates  the 
fact  that  what  to  us  is  one  sound,  and  therefore  represented  in 
writing  by  one  letter,  appears  to  the  child's  ear  as  different  sounds 
— and  generally  the  phonetician  will  agree  with  the  child  that 
there  are  really  differences  in  the  articulation  of  the  sound  according 
to  position  in  the  syllable  and  to  surroundings,  only  the  child 
exaggerates  the  dissimilarities,  just  as  we  in  writing  one  and  the 
same  letter  exaggerate  the  similarity. 

The  two  th  sounds  offer  some  difficulties  and  are  often  imitated 
as  /  and  v  respectively,  as  in  '  frow  '  and  '  muvver  '  for  '  throw  ' 
and  'mother';  others  say  '  ze '  or  '  de  '  for  'the.'  Hilary  M. 
(2.0)  has  great  difficulty  with  th  and  s  ;  th  usually  becomes  [/], 
[be/,  ti/,  /ri]  for  'Beth,'  'teeth,'  'three';  s  becomes  [/], 
e.g.  [fran/i/,  firm.]  for  '  Francis,'  '  steam  '  ;  in  the  same  way 
z  becomes  [5]  as  in  [Ubs,  bou5]  for  '  loves,'  '  Bowes  '  ;  sw  becomes 
[fw]  as  in  [Ivfirj,  fwit]  for  '  swing,'  '  sweet.'  She  drops  I  in  conso- 
nantal combinations,  e.g.  [ki'n,  kaim,  kok,  /ip]  for  '  clean,' 
'climb,'    'clock,'    'sleep.' 

Sometimes  it  requires  a  phonetician's  knowledge  to  understand 
the  individual  sound-laws  of  a  child.  Thus  I  pick  out  from  some 
specimens  given  by  O'Shea,  p.  135  f.  (girl,  2.9),  the  following 
words  :  pell  (smell),  teeze  (sneeze),  poke  (smoke),  tow  (snow),  and 
formulate  the  rule  :  «  -f-  a  nasal  became  the  voiceless  stop  corre- 


108  SOUNDS  [cii.  V 

spending  to  the  nasal,  a  kind  of  assimilation,  in  vhich  the  place 
of  articulation  and  the  mouth-closure  of  the  nasals  were  preserved, 
and  the  sound  was  made  unvoiced  and  non-nasal  as  the  s.  In 
other  combinations  m  and  7i  were  intact. 

Some  further  faults  are  illustrated  in  Tony  E.'s  [t/ouz,  pAg, 
pus,  taem,  pAm,  bask,  pi'z,  nous,  ok,  es,  u']  for  clothes,  plug,  imsh, 
tram,  plum,  black,  please,  nose,  clock,  yes,  you. 


V. — §4.  Groups  of  Sounds. 

Even  when  a  sound  by  itself  can  be  pronounced,  the  child 
often  finds  it  hard  to  pronounce  it  when  it  forms  part  of  a  group 
of  sounds.  8  is  often  drojDped  before  another  consonant,  as  in 
'  tummy '  for  '  stomach.'  Other  examples  have  already  been 
given  above,  Hilary  M.  (2.0)  had  difficulty  with  Ip  and  said 
[haepl]  for  '  help.'  She  also  said  [ointon]  for  '  ointment  '  ; 
C.  M.  L.  (2.3)  said  '  sikkums  '  for  'sixpence.'  Tony  E.  (2.0) 
turns  grannie  into  [nsegi].  When  initial  consonant  groups  are 
simplified,  it  is  generally,  though  not  always,  the  stop  that  remains  : 
b  instead  of  bl-,  br-,  k  instead  of  kr-,  sk-,  skr-,  p  instead  of  pi-,  pr-, 
sjir-,  etc.  For  the  groups  occurring  medially  and  finally  no  general 
rule  seems  possible. 

V. — §  5.  Mutilations  and  Reduplications. 

To  begin  Avith,  the  child  is  unable  to  master  long  sequences 
of  syllables  ;  he  prefers  monosyllables  and  often  emits  them  singly 
and  separated  by  pauses.  Even  in  words  that  to  us  are  inseparable 
wholes  some  children  will  make  breaks  between  syllables,  e.g. 
Shef-field,  Ing-land.  But  more  often  they  will  give  only  part 
of  the  word,  generally  the  last  syllable  or  syllables  ;  hence  we  get 
pet-names  like  Bet  or  Beth  for  Elizabeth  and  forms  like  '  tatoes  ' 
for  potatoes,  '  chine  '  for  machine,  '  tina  '  for  concertina,  '  tash  ' 
for  moustache,  etc.  Hilary  M.  (1.10)  called  an  express-cart  a 
press-cart,  bananas  and  pyjamas  nanas  and  jamas. 

It  is  not,  however,  the  production  of  long  sequences  of  syllables 
in  itself  that  is  difficult  to  the  child,  for  in  its  meaningless  babbling 
it  may  begin  very  early  to  pronounce  long  strings  of  sounds  without 
any  break  ;  but  the  difficulty  is  to  remember  what  sounds  have 
to  be  put  together  to  bring  about  exactly  this  or  that  word.  We 
grown-up  people  may  experience  just  the  same  sort  of  difficulty 
if  after  hearing  once  the  long  name  of  a  Bulgarian  minister  or  a 
Sanskrit  book  we  are  required  to  repeat  it  at  once.  Hence  we  should 
not  wonder  at  such  pronunciations  as  [pekalout]  for  petticoat  or 
[efebnt]  for  elephant  (Beth  M.,  2.C) ;  Hilary  M.  called  a  caterpillar 


§5]        MUTILATIONS  AND   REDUPLICATIONS       109 

a  pillarcat.     Other  transpositions  are  serreval  for  several  and  ocken 
for  uncle  ;  cf.  also  ivops  for  wasp. 

To  explain  the  frequent  reduplications  found  in  children's 
language  it  is  not  necessary,  as  some  learned  authors  have  done, 
to  refer  to  the  great  number  of  reduplicated  words  in  the  languages 
of  primitive  tribes  and  to  see  in  the  same  phenomenon  in  our  own 
children  an  atavistic  return  to  primitive  conditions,  on  the  Hiickelian 
assumption  that  the  development  of  each  individual  has  to  pass 
rapidly  through  the  same  ('  phylogenetic  ')  stages  as  the  whole 
lineage  of  his  ancestors.  It  is  simpler  and  more  natural  to  refer 
these  reduplications  to  the  pleasure  always  felt  in  repeating  the 
same  muscular  action  until  one  is  tired.  The  child  will  repeat 
over  and  over  again  the  same  movements  of  legs  and  arms,  and 
we  do  the  same  when  we  wave  our  hand  or  a  handkerchief  or  when 
we  nod  our  head  several  times  to  signify  assent,  etc.  When  we 
laugh  we  repeat  the  same  syllable  consisting  of  h  and  a  more  or 
less  indistinct  vowel,  and  when  we  sing  a  melody  without  words 
we  are  apt  to  '  reduplicate  '  indefiniteh'.  Thus  also  with  the 
little  ones.  Apart  from  such  words  as  papa  and  mamma,  to  which 
we  shall  have  to  revert  in  another  chapter  (VIII,  §  9),  children 
will  often  form  words  from  those  of  their  elders  by  repeating  one 
syllable  ;  cf.  pt'ff-puff,  gee-gee.  Tracy  (p.  132)  records  pepe  for 
'pencil,'  kaka  for  'Carrie,'  For  a  few  weeks  (1.11)  Hilary  M. 
reduplicated  whole  words,  e.g.  king-king,  ring-ring  (i.e.  bell), 
water-water.  Tony  F.  (1.10)  uses  [touto]  for  his  own  name. 
Hence  pet-names  like  Dodo  ;  they  are  extremely  frequent  in  French 
— for  instance,  Fifine,  Lolotie,  Lolo,  Mimi ;  the  name  Daudet  has 
arisen  in  a  similar  waj^  from  Clatidet,  a  diminutive  of  Claude. 

It  is  a  similar  phenomenon  (a  kind  of  partial  reduplication) 
when  sounds  at  a  distance  affect  one  another,  as  when  Hilarj'  M. 
(2.0)  said  [gogi]  for  doggie,  [bobin]  for  Dobbin,  [dezman  din]  for 
Jesmond  Dene,  [baikikl]  for  bicycle,  [kekl]  for  kettle.  Tracy  (p.  133) 
mentions  60^00  for  '  bottle,'  in  which  00  stands  for  the  hollow 
sound  of  syllabic  I.  One  correspondent  mentions  ivhoofing-covgh 
for  '  whooping-cough  '  (where  the  final  sound  has  crept  into  the 
first  word)  and  chicken-pops  for  '  chicken-pox.'  Some  children 
say  '  aneneme  '  for  anemone;  and  in  S.  L.  (4.9)  this  caused  a 
curious  confusion  during  the  recent  war:  "Mother,  there  must 
be  two  sorts  of  anenemies,  flowers  and  Germans." 

Dr.  Henry  Bradley  once  told  me  that  his  youngest  child  had 
a  difficulty  with  the  name  Connie,  which  was  made  alternatingly 
[toni]  and  [ko^i],  in  both  cases  with  two  consonants  articulated 
at  the  same  point.  Similar  instances  are  mentioned  in  German 
books  on  children's  language,  thus  gigarr    for   '  zigarre,'   baibift 


110  SOUNDS  [en.  v 

for  '  bleistift,'  autobobil  (Meringer),^  fotofafieren  (Stern),  ambam 
for  '  armband,'  dan  for  '  dame,'  jpajp  for  '  patte  '  (Ronjat).  I 
have  given  many  Danish  examples  in  my  Danish  book.  Gram- 
mont's  child  (see  Milangca  linguistiques  offerts  d  A.  MeiUet,  1902) 
carried  through  these  changes  in  a  most  systematic  way. 


V. — §6.  Correction. 

The  time  comes  when  the  child  corrects  his  mistakes — where 
it  said  'tat'  it  now  says  'cat.'  Here  there  are  two  possibilities 
which  both  seem  to  occur  in  actual  life.  One  is  that  the  cliild 
hears  the  correct  sound  some  time  before  he  is  able  to  imitate  it 
correctly  ;  he  will  thus  still  say  t  for  k,  though  he  may  in  some 
way  object  to  other  people  saying  '  turn  '  for  '  come.'  Passy 
relates  how  a  little  French  girl  would  say  tosson  both  for  gar^on 
and  cochon;  but  she  protested  when  anybody  else  said  "  C'est 
un  petit  cochon  "  in  speaking  about  a  boy,  or  vice  versa.  Such 
a  child,  as  soon  as  it  can  produce  the  new  sound,  puts  it  correctly 
into  all  the  places  where  it  is  required.  This,  I  take  it,  is  the 
ordinary  procedure.  Frans  (my  own  boy)  could  not  pronounce 
h  and  said  an,  on  for  the  Danish  pronouns  han,  hun  ;  but  when 
he  began  to  pronounce  this  sound,  he  never  misplaced  it  (2.4). 

The  other  possibility  is  that  the  child  learns  how  to  pronounce 
the  new  sound  at  a  time  when  its  o^^ti  acoustic  impression  is  not 
yet  quite  settled  ;  in  that  case  there  will  be  a  period  during  which 
his  use  of  the  new  sound  is  uncertain  and  fluctuating.  When 
parents  are  in  too  great  a  hurry  to  get  a  child  out  of  some  false 
pronunciation,  they  may  succeed  in  giving  it  a  new  sound,  but 
the  child  will  tend  to  introduce  it  in  places  where  it  does  not  belong. 
On  the  whole,  it  seems  therefore  the  safest  plan  to  leave  it  to  the 
child  itself  to  discover  that  its  sound  is  not  the  correct  one. 

Sometimes  a  child  will  acquire  a  sound  or  a  sound  combination 
correctly  and  then  lose  it  till  it  reappears  a  few  months  later. 
In  an  English  family  where  there  was  no  question  of  the  influence 
of  A-less  servants,  each  child  in  succession  passed  through  an  7i-Iess 
period,  and  one  of  the  children,  after  pronouncing  h  correctly, 
lost  the  use  of  it  altogether  for  two  or  three  months.  I  have 
had  similar  experiences  viith  Danish  children.  S.  L.  (ab.  2)  said 
'  bontin  '  for  bonnet ;  but  five  months  earlier  she  had  said  bonnet 
correctly. 

The  path  to  perfection  is  not  alwa3^s  a  straight  one.  Tonj-  E. 
in  order  to  arrive  at  the  correct  pronunciation  of  'please  passed 
through    the    following    stages  :     (1)  [bi-],     (2)  [bli-j,     (3)  [pi'z], 

*  An  American  child  said  atUonohile  [otonobi'l]  with  partial  assimilation 
of  m  to  the  point-stop  t. 


§  6]  CORRECTION  111 

(4)  [p\vi-5],  (5)  [beisk,  meis,  mais]  and  several  other  impossible 
forms.  Tracy  (p.  139)  gives  the  following  forms  through  which 
the  boy  A.  (1.5)  had  to  pass  before  being  able  to  say  pussy  :  poohch, 
j)Oofie,  poopoohie,  poofee.  A  French  child  had  four  forms  [nieni, 
peti,  meti,  mesi]  before  being  able  to  say  merci  correctly  (Gram- 
mont).  A  Danish  child  passed  through  bejab  and  vamb  before 
pronouncing  svamp  ('  sponge  '),  etc. 

It  is  certain  that  all  this  while  the  little  brain  is  working,  and 
even  consciously  working,  though  at  first  it  has  not  sufficient 
command  of  speech  to  say  anything  about  it.  Meringer  sa^'s  that 
children  do  not  practise,  but  that  their  new  acquisitions  of  sounds 
happen  at  once  without  any  visible  preparation.  He  may  be  right 
in  the  main  with  regard  to  the  learning  of  single  sounds,  though 
even  there  I  incline  to  doubt  the  possibility  of  a  universal  rule  ; 
but  Ronjat  (p.  55)  is  certainly  right  as  against  Meringer  with 
regard  to  the  way  in  which  children  learn  new  and  difficult  com- 
binations. Here  they  certainly  do  practise,  and  are  proudly 
conscious  of  the  happy  results  of  their  efforts.  When  Frans  (2.11) 
mastered  the  combination  fl,  he  was  very  proud,  and  asked  his 
mother :  "  Mother,  can  you  B&,y  fiyve  ?  "  ;  then  he  came  to  me  and 
told  me  that  he  could  say  bluse  and  fine,  and  when  asked  whether 
he  could  saj'  blad,  he  answered  :  "  No,  not  j'et  ;  Frans  cannot 
say  b-Jad  "  (with  a  little  interval  between  the  b  and  the  I).  Five 
weeks  later  he  said  :  "  Mother,  won't  j'ou  play  upon  the  klaver 
(piano)  ?  "  and  after  a  little  while,  "  Frans  can  say  kla  so  well." 
About  the  same  time  he  first  misj)ronounced  the  word  manchetter, 
and  then  (when  I  asked  what  he  was  sa5ing,  without  telling  him 
that  anything  w^as  WTong)  he  gave  it  the  correct  sound,  and  I 
heard  him  afterwards  in  the  adjoining  room  repeat  the  word  to 
himself  in  a  whisper. 

How  well  children  observe  sounds  is  again  seen  by  the  way 
in  which  they  'oill  correct  their  elders  if  they  give  a  pronunciation 
to  Avhich  they  are  not  accustomed — for  instance,  in  a  verse  the3* 
have  learnt  by  heart.  Beth  M  (2.6)  was  never  satisfied  with  her 
parents'  pronunciation  of  "  What  will  you  buy  me  when  you  get 
there  ?  "  She  always  insisted  on  their  gabbling  the  first  M'ords 
as  quickly  as  they  could  and  then  coming  out  with  an  emphatic 
there. 

v.— §  7.  Tone. 

As  to  the  differences  in  the  tone  of  a  voice,  even  a  baby  shows 
by  his  expression  that  he  can  distinguish  clearly  between  what 
is  said  to  him  lovingly  and  what  sharply,  a  long  time  before  he 
understands  a  single  word  of  what  is  said.     Many  children  are 


112  SOUNDS  [CH.  V 

able  at  a  very  early  age  to  hit  off  the  exact  note  in  which  some- 
thing is  said  or  sung.  Here  is  a  story  of  a  boy  of  more  advanced 
age.  In  Copenhagen  he  had  had  his  hair  cut  by  a  Swedish  lady 
and  did  not  like  it.  When  he  travelled  with  his  mother  to  Norway, 
as  soon  as  he  entered  tlie  house,  he  broke  out  with  a  scream  : 
"  Mother,  I  hope  I'm  not  going  to  have  my  hair  cut  ?  "  He  had 
noticed  the  Norwegian  intonation,  which  is  very  like  the  Swedish, 
and  it  brought  an  unpleasant  association  of  ideas. 


CHAPTER   VI 
WORDS 

§  1.  Introductory,  §  2.  First  Period.  §  3.  Father  and  Mother.  §  4.  The 
DeUmitation  of  Meaning.  §  5.  Numerals.  Time.  §  6.  Various  Diffi- 
culties.    §  7.  Shifters.     §  8.  Extent  of  Vocabulary.     §  9.  Siunmary. 

VI. — §1.  Introductory. 

In  the  preceding  chapter,  in  order  to  simphfy  matters,  we  have 
dealt  with  sounds  only,  as  if  they  were  learnt  by  themselves  and 
independently  of  the  meanings  attached  to  them.  But  that,  of 
course,  is  only  an  abstraction  :  to  the  child,  as  well  as  to  the 
grown-up,  the  two  elements,  the  outer,  phonetic  element,  and  the 
inner  element,  the  meaning,  of  a  w^ord  are  indissolubly  connected, 
and  the  child  has  no  interest,  or  very  little  interest^  in  trying  to 
imitate  the  sounds  of  its  parents  except  just  in  so  far  as  these 
mean  something,  ffhat  words  have  a  meaning,  the  child  will 
begin  to  perceive  at  a  very  early  age.  Parents  may  of  course 
deceive  themselves  and  attribute  to  the  child  a  more  complete 
and  exact  understanding  of  speech  than  the  child  is  capable  of. 
That  the  child  looks  at  its  father  when  it  hears  the  word  '  father,' 
may  mean  at  first  nothing  more  than  that  it  follows  its  mother's 
glance  ;  but  naturally  in  this  way  it  is  prepared  for  actually  asso- 
ciating the  idea  of  '  father  '  with  the  sound.  If  the  child  learns 
the  feat  of  lifting  its  arms  when  it  is  asked  "  How  big  is  the  boy  ?  " 
it  is  not  to  be  supposed  that  the  single  words  of  the  sentence  are 
understood,  or  that  the  child  has  any  conception  of  size  ;  he  only 
knows  that  when  this  series  of  sounds  is  said  he  is  admired  if  he 
lifts  his  arms  up  :  and  so  the  sentence  as  a  whole  has  the  effect 
of  a  word  of  command.  A  dog  has  the  same  degree  of  under- 
standing. Hilary  M.  (1.0),  when  you  said  to  her  at  any  time  the 
refrain  "  He  greeted  me  so,"  from  "  Here  come  three  knights  from 
Spain,"  would  bow  and  salute  with  her  hand,  as  she  had  seen  some 
children  doing  it  when  practising  the  song. 

The.  understanding  of  what  is  said  always  precedes  the  power 
of  saj'ing  the  same  thing  oneself — often  precedes  it  for  an  extra- 
ordinarily long  time.  One  father  notes  that  his  little  daughter 
of  a  year  and  seven  months  brings  what  is  wanted  and  understands 
questions  while  she  cannot  say  a  word.     It  often  happens  that 

8  113 


114  WORDS  [CH.  VI 

parents  some  tine  claj'  come  to  regret  what  they  have  said  in  the 
presence  of  a  child  without  suspecting  how  much  it  understands. 
"  Little  pitchers  have  long  ears." 

One  can,  however,  easily  err  in  regard  to  the  range  and  cer- 
tainty of  a  child's  understanding.  The  Swiss  philologist  Tappolet 
noticed  that  his  child  of  six  months,  when  he  said  '"  Where  is  the 
window  ?  "  made  vague  movements  towards  the  window.  He 
made  the  expeiiment  of  repeating  his  question  in  French — with 
the  same  intonation  as  in  German,  and  the  child  acted  just  as  it 
had  done  before.  It  is,  projjerly  si:)eaking,  only  when  the  child 
begins  to  talk  that  we  can  be  at  all  sure  what  it  has  really  under- 
stood, and  even  then  it  may  at  times  be  difficult  to  sound  the 
depths  of  the  child's  conception. 

The  child's  acquisition  of  the  meaning  of  words  is  truly  a  highly 
complicated  affair.  How  many  things  arc  comprehended  under 
one  word  ?  The  answer  is  not  easy  in  all  cases.  The  single  Danish 
word  keppe  covers  all  that  is  expressed  in  English  by  carpet,  rug, 
blanket,  counterpane,  curtain  (theatrical).  And  there  is  still 
more  complication  when  Ave  come  to  abstract  ideas.  The  child 
has  somehow  to  find  out  for  himself  with  regard  to  his  own  lan- 
guage what  ideas  are  considered  to  hang  together  and  so  come 
under  the  same  word.  He  hears  the  word  '  chair  '  applied  to 
a  particular  chaii",  then  to  another  chair  that  perhaps  looks  to 
him  totally  different,  and  again  to  a  third  :  and  it  becomes  his 
business  to  group  these  together. 

What  Stern  tells  about  his  own  boy  is  certainly  exceptional, 
perhaps  unique.  The  boy  ran  to  a  door  and  said  das  ^  ('  That  ?  ' 
— his  way  of  asking  the  name  of  a  thing).  They  told  him  '  tiir.' 
He  then  Avent  to  two  other  doors  in  the  room,  and  each  time  the 
performance  was  repeated.  He  then  did  the  same  with  the  seven 
chairs  in  the  room.  Stern  saj^s,  ''As  he  thus  makes  sure  that 
the  objects  that  are  alike  to  his  eye  and  to  his  sense  of  touch  have 
also  the  same  name,  he  is  on  his  way  to  general  conceptions." 
We  should,  hoAvever,  be  Avary  of  attributing  general  ideas  to  little 
children. 


VI.— §  2.  First  Period. 

In  the  first  jieriod  Ave  meet  the  same  phenomena  in  the  child's 
acquisition  of  Avord-meanings  that  Ave  found  in  his  acquisition  of 
sounds.  A  child  develops  conceptions  of  his  OAvn  Avhich  are  as 
unintelligible  and  strange  to  the  uninitiated  as  his  sounds. 

Among  the  child's  first  passions  are  animals  and  pictures  of 
animals,  but  for  a  certain  time  it  is  quite  arbitrary  what  animals 
are  classed  together  under  a  particular  name.     A  child  of  nine 


§2]  FIRST   PERIOD  115 

months  noticed  that  his  grandfather's  dog  said  '  bow-wow  '  and 
fancied  that  anything  not  human  could  say  (and  therefore  should 
be  called)  bow-wow — pigs  and  horses  included.  A  little  girl  of 
two  called  a  horse  he  (Danish  hest)  and  divided  the  animal  kingdom 
into  two  groups,  (1)  horses,  including  all  four-footed  things,  even 
a  tortoise,  and  (2)  fishes  (pronounced  iz),  including  r\ll  that  moved 
without  use  of  feet,  for  example,  birds  and  flies.  A  boy  of  1.8 
saw  a  picture  of  a  Danish  priest  in  a  ruflf  and  was  told  that  it  was 
a  prcest,  which  he  rendered  as  beep.  Afterwards  seeing  a  jiicture 
of  an  aunt  with  a  white  collar  which  recalled  the  priest's  ruff,  he 
said  again  beep,  and  this  remained  the  name  of  the  aunt,  and  even 
of  another  aunt,  who  was  called  '  other  bsej).'  These  transfer- 
ences are  sometimes  extraordinary.  A  boy  who  had  had  a  pig 
drawn  for  him,  the  pig  being  called  of,  at  the  age  of  1.6  used  of 

(1)  for  a  pig,  (2)  for  drawing  a  pig,  (3)  for  writing  in  general. 
Such  transferences  may  seem  very  absurd,  but  are  not  more 

so  than  some  transferences  occurring  in  the  language  of  grown-up 
persons.  The  word  Tripos  passed  from  the  sense  of  a  three-legged 
stool  to  the  man  who  sat  on  a  three-legged  stool  to  dispute  with 
candidates  for  degrees  at  Cambridge.  Then,  as  it  was  the  duty 
of  ]Mr.  Tripos  also  to  provide  comic  verses,  these  were  called  tripos 
verses,  such  verses  being  printed  under  that  name  till  very  near 
the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century,  though  IVIi-.  Tripos  himself  had 
disappeared  long  ago.  And  as  the  examination  list  was  printed 
on  the  back  of  these  verses,  it  was  called  the  Tripos  list,  and  it 
was  no  far  cry  to  saying  of  a  successful  candidate,  "  he  stands 
high  on  the  Tripos,"  which  now  came  to  mean  the  examination 
itself. 

But  to  return  to  the  classifications  in  the  minds  of  the  children. 
Hilary  M.  (1.6  to  2.0)  used  the  word  daisy  (1)  of  the  flower  itself, 

(2)  of  any  flower,  (3)  of  an}'-  conventional  flower  in  a  pattern, 
(4)  of  any  pattern.  One  of  the  first  words  she  said  was  colour 
(1.4),  and  she  got  into  a  way  of  saying  it  when  anything  striking 
attracted  her  attention.  Originally  she  heard  the  word  of  a 
bright  patch  of  colour  in  a  picture.  The  word  was  still  in  use 
at  the  age  of  two.  For  some  months  anything  that  moved  was 
a  fly,  every  man  was  a  soldier,  everybody  that  was  not  a  man 
was  a  baby.  S.  L.  (1.8)  used  ting  (1)  for  a  door,  (2)  for  bricks 
or  building  with  bricks.  The  connexion  is  through  the  bang 
of  a  door  or  a  tumbling  castle  of  bricks,  but  the  name  was  trans- 
ferred to  the  objects.  It  is  curious  that  at  1.3  she  had  the  word 
bang  for  anji:hing  dropped,  but  not  bing  ;  at  1.8  she  had  both, 
bing  being  specialized  as  above.  From  books  about  children's 
language  I  quote  two  illustrations.  Ronjat's  son  used  the  word 
papement,  which  stands  for  '  kaffemensch,'  in  speaking  about  the 


IIG  WORDS  [CH.  VI 

grocer's  boy  who  brought  coffee  ;  but  as  he  had  a  kind  of  uniform 
with  a  flat  cap,  papement  was  also  used  of  German  and  Russian 
officers  in  the  illustrated  papers.  Hilde  Stern  (1.9)  used  bichu 
for  drawer  or  chest  of  drawers  ;  it  originated  in  the  word  biicher 
(books),  which  was  said  when  her  picture-books  were  taken  out 
of  the  drawer. 

A  warning  is,  however,  necessary.  When  a  grown-up  person 
says  that  a  child  uses  the  same  word  to  denote  various  things, 
he  is  apt  to  assume  that  the  child  gives  a  word  two  or  three  definite 
meanings,  as  he  does.  The  process  is  rather  in  this  way.  A  child 
has  got  a  new  toy,  a  horse,  and  at  the  same  time  has  heard  its 
elders  use  the  word  '  horse,'  which  it  has  imitated  as  well  as  it 
can.  It  now  associates  the  word  with  the  delight  of  playing  with 
its  toy.  If  the  next  day  it  says  the  same  sound,  and  its  friends 
give  it  the  horse,  the  child  gains  the  experience  that  the  sound 
brings  the  fulfilment  of  its  wish  :  but  if  it  sets  its  eye  on  a  china 
cow  and  utters  the  same  sound,  the  father  takes  note  that  tlie 
sound  also  denotes  a  cow,  while  for  the  child  it  is  perhaps  a  mere 
experiment — '"  Could  not  I  get  my  wish  for  that  nice  thing  fulfilled 
in  the  same  way  ?  "  If  it  succeeds,  the  experiment  may  very  well 
be  repeated,  and  the  more  or  less  faulty  imitation  of  the  word 
'  horse  '  thus  bj^  the  co-operation  of  those  around  it  may  become 
also  firmly  attached  to  '  cow.' 

When  Elsa  B.  (1.10),  on  seeing  the  stopper  of  a  bottle  in  the 
garden,  came  out  with  the  word  '  beer,'  it  would  be  rash  to  conclude 
(as  her  father  did)  that  the  word  '  beer  '  to  her  meant  a  '  stopper  '  : 
all  we  know  is  that  her  thoughts  had  taken  that  direction,  and 
that  some  time  before,  on  seeing  a  stopper,  she  had  heard  the 
word  '  beer.' 

Parents  sometimes  unconsciously  lead  a  child  into  error  about 
the  use  of  words.  A  little  nephew  of  mine  asked  to  taste  his 
father's  beer,  and  when  refused  made  so  much  to-do  that  the 
father  said,  "  Come,  let  us  have  peace  in  the  house."  Next  day, 
under  the  same  circumstances,  the  boy  asked  for  '  peace  in  the 
house,'  and  this  became  the  family  name  for  beer.  Not  infre- 
quently what  is  said  on  certain  occasions  is  taken  by  the  child  to 
be  the  name  of  some  object  concerned  ;  thus  a  sniff  or  some  sound 
imitating  it  may  come  to  mean  a  flower,  and  '  hurrah  '  a  flag. 
S.  L.  from  an  early  age  was  fond  of  flowers,  and  at  1.8  used 
'  pretty  '  or  '  pretty-pretty  '  as  a  substantive  instead  of  the  word 
'  flower,'  which  she  learnt  at  1.10. 

I  may  mention  here  that  analogous  mistakes  may  occur  Avhen 
missionaries  or  others  write  down  words  from  foreign  languages 
with  which  they  are  not  familiar.  In  the  oldest  list  of  Green- 
landic  words  (of  1587)  there  is  thus  a  word  ixmygmah  given  with 


§2]  FIRST   PERIOD  117 

the  signification  '  needle  '  ;  as  a  matter  of  fact  it  means  '  my 
daughter's '  :  the  Englishman  pointed  at  the  needle,  but  the 
Eskimo  thought  he  wanted  to  know  whom  it  belonged  to.  In  an 
old  list  of  words  in  the  now  extinct  Polabian  language  we  find 
^' scumbe,  yesterday,  subuda,  to-day,  jamdigh'a,  to-morrow":  the 
questions  were  put  on  a  Satiirday,  and  the  Slav  answered  accord- 
ingly, for  subuta  (the  same  word  as  Sabbath)  means  Saturday, 
skumpe  'fasting-day,'  and  ja  nediJa  'it  is  Sunday.' 

According  to  0  Shea  (p.  131)  "a  child  Avas  greatly  impressed 
with  the  horns  of  a  buck  the  first  time  he  saw  him.  The  father 
used  the  term  '  sheep  '  several  times  while  the  creature  was  being 
inspected,  and  it  was  discovered  afterwards  that  the  child  had 
made  the  association  between  the  word  and  the  animal's  horns, 
so  now  sheep  signifies  primarily  horns,  whether  seen  in  pictures 
or  in  real  life."  It  is  clear  that  mistakes  of  that  kind  will  happen 
more  readily  if  the  Avord  is  said  singly  than  Avhen  it  is  embodied 
in  whole  connected  sentences  :  the  latter  method  is  on  the  whole 
preferable  for  many  reasons. 


VI.— §  3.  Father  and  Mother. 

A  child  is  often  faced  by  some  linguistic  usage  which  obliges 
him  again  and  again  to  change  his  notions,  widen  them,  narrow 
them,  till  he  succeeds  in  giving  words  the  same  range  of  meaning 
that  his  elders  give  them. 

Frequently,  perhaps  most  frequently,  a  word  is  at  first  for 
the  child  a  proper  name.  '  Wood  '  means  not  a  wood  in  general, 
but  the  particular  picture  which  has  been  pointed  out  to  the  child 
in  the  dining-room.  The  little  girl  who  calls  her  mother's  black 
muff  '  muff,'  but  refuses  to  transfer  the  word  to  her  own  white 
one,  is  at  the  same  stage.  Naturally,  then,  the  word  father  when 
first  heard  is  a  proper  name,  the  name  of  the  child's  own  father. 
But  soon  it  must  be  extended  to  other  individuals  who  have  some- 
thing or  other  in  common  with  the  child's  father.  One  child  will 
use  it  of  all  tnen,  another  perhaps  of  all  men  with  beards,  while 
'  lady  '  is  applied  to  all  pictures  of  faces  AAdthout  beards  ;  a  third 
will  apply  the  word  to  father,  mother  and  grandfather.  When 
the  child  itself  applies  the  word  to  another  man  it  is  soon  corrected, 
but  at  the  same  time  it  cannot  avoid  hearing  another  child  call 
a  strange  man  '  father  '  or  getting  to  know  that  the  gardener  is 
Jack's  '  father,'  etc.  The  word  then  comes  to  mean  to  the  child 
'  a  groA\Ti-up  person  who  goes  with  or  belongs  to  a  little  one,' 
and  he  will  say,  "  See,  there  goes  a  dog  with  his  father."  Or,  he 
comes  to  know  that  the  cat  is  the  kittens'  father,  and  the  dog  the 
puppies'  father,  and  next  day  asks,  "  Wasps,  are  they  the  flies' 


118  WORDS  [cH.  VI 

father,  or  are  they  perhaps  their  mother  ?  "  (as  Frans  did,  4.10). 
Finally,  by  such  guessing  and  drawing  conclusions  he  gains  full 
understanding  of  the  word,  and  is  ready  to  make  acquaintance 
later  with  its  more  remote  applications,  as  '  The  King  is  the 
father  of  his  people  ;  Father  O'Flynn  ;  Boyle  was  the  father  of 
chemistry,'  etc. 

Difficulties  are  caused  to  the  child  when  its  father  puts  him- 
self on  the  child's  plane  and  calls  his  wife  '  mother  '  just  as  he 
calls  his  own  mother  '  mother,'  though  at  other  moments  the 
child  hears  him  call  her  'grandmother'  or  'grannie.'  Professor 
Sturtevant  writes  to  me  that  a  neighbour  child,  a  girl  of  about 
five  years,  called  out  to  him,  "  I  saw  your  girl  and  your  mother," 
meaning  '  your  daughter  and  your  wife.'  In  many  families  the 
words  '  sister  '  ('  Sissie  ')  or  '  brother  '  are  used  constantly  instead 
of  his  or  her  real  name.  Here  we  see  the  reason  why  so  often  such 
names  of  relations  change  their  meaning  in  the  history  of  lan- 
guages ;  G.  vetter  probably  at  first  meant  '  father's  brother,'  as 
it  corresponds  to  Latin  patruus  ;  G.  base,  from  '  father's  sister,' 
came  to  mean  also  '  mother's  sister,'  '  niece  '  and  '  cousin.'  The 
word  that  corresponds  etymologically  to  our  mother  has  come 
to  mean  '  wife '  or  '  woman  '  in  Lithuanian  and  '  sister  '  in 
Albanian. 

The  same  extension  that  we  saw  in  the  case  of  '  father  '  now 
may  take  place  with  real  proper  names.  Tony  E.  (3.5),  when  a 
fresh  charwoman  came,  told  his  mother  not  to  have  this  Mary  : 
the  last  charwoman's  name  was  Mary.^  In  exactlj'  the  same  way 
a  Danish  child  applied  the  name  of  their  servant,  Ingeborg,  as 
a  general  word  for  servant :  "  Auntie's  Ingeborg  is  called  Ann," 
etc.,  and  a  German  girl  said  viele  Aiigiisten  for  '  manj'  girls.'  This, 
of  course,  is  the  way  in  which  doll  has  come  to  mean  a  '  toy  baby,' 
and  we  use  the  same  extension  when  we  say  of  a  statesman  that 
he  is  no  Bismarck,  etc. 

VI. — §4.  The  Delimitation  of  Meaning. 

The  association  of  a  word  with  its  meaning  is  accomplished 
for  the  child  by  a  series  of  single  incidents,  and  as  many  words 
are  understood  only  by  the  help  of  the  situation,  it  is  natui'al  that 
the  exact  force  of  many  of  them  is  not  seized  at  once.  A  boy  of 
4.10,  hearing  that  his  father  had  seen  the  lung,  inquii-ed,  "  Has 
he  a  head  at  both  ends  ?  " — his  conception  of  a  king  being  derived 
from  playing-cards.  Another  child  was  born  on  what  the  Danes 
call  Constitution  Day,  the  consequence  being  that  he  confused 
birthday  and  Constitution  Day,  and  would  speak  of  "  my  Consti- 
>  Cf.  Beach-la-Mar,  below,  Ch.  XII  §  1. 


§4]  THE    DELIMITATION   OF  MEANING  119 

tution  Day,"  and  tlien  his  brother  and  sister  also  began  to  talk  of 
their  Constitution  DaJ^ 

Hilary  M.  (2.0)  and  Murdoch  D.  (2.6)  used  dinner,  breakfast 
and  tea  interchangeabl}^ — the  words  might  be  translated  '  meal.' 
Other  more  or  less  similar  confusions  may  be  mentioned  here. 
Tony  F.  (2.8)  used  the  term  sing  for  (1)  reading,  (2)  singing,  (3) 
any  game  in  which  his  elders  amused  him.  Hilary  said  indifferenth', 
'  Daddy,  sing  a  story  three  bears,'  and  '  Daddy,  tell  a  storj^  three 
bears.'  She  cannot  remember  which  is  knife  and  which  is  fork. 
Beth  M.  (2.6)  always  used  can't  when  she  meant  won't.  It  meant 
simply  refusal  to  do  what  she  did  not  want  to. 


VI. — §  5.  Numerals.    Time. 

It  is  interesting  to  watch  the  way  in  which  arithmetical  notions 
grow  in  extent  and  clearness.  Many  children  learn  very  early 
to  say  one,  two,  which  is  often  said  to  them  when  they  learn  how 
to  walk  ;  but  no  ideas  are  associated  with  these  syllables.  In  the 
same  wa3'  manj'-  children  are  di'illed  to  say  three  when  the  parents 
begin  with  07ie,  two,  etc.  The  idea  of  plurality  is  gradually  deve- 
loped, but  a  child  may  very  well  answer  two  when  asked  how  many 
fingers  papa  has  ;  Frans  used  the  combinations  some-two  and 
some-three  to  express  'more  than  one  '  (2.4).  At  the  age  of  2.11 
he  was  very  fond  of  counting,  but  while  he  always  got  the  first 
four  numbers  right,  he  would  skip  over  5  and  7  ;  and  when  asked 
to  count  the  apples  in  a  bowl,  he  would  say  rapidly  1-2-3-4,  even 
if  there  were  only  three,  or  stop  at  3,  even  if  there  were  five  or 
more.  At  3.4  he  counted  objects  as  far  as  10  correctly,  but  might 
easily  pass  from  11  to  13,  and  if  the  things  to  be  counted  were  not 
placed  in  a  row  he  was  apt  to  bungle  by  moving  his  fingers  irregu- 
larly from  one  to  another.  When  he  was  3.8  he  answered  the 
question  "  What  do  2  and  2  make  ?  "  quite  correctly,  but  next  day 
to  the  same  question  he  answered  "  Three,"  though  in  a  doubtful 
tone  of  voice.  This  was  in  the  spring,  and  next  month  I  noted  : 
*'  His  sense  of  number  is  evidently  weaker  than  it  was  :  the  open- 
air  life  makes  him  forget  this  as  well  as  all  the  verses  he  knew  by 
heart  in  the  winter."  When  the  next  winter  came  his  counting 
exercises  again  amused  him,  but  at  first  he  was  in  a  fix  as  before 
about  any  numbers  after  6,  although  he  could  repeat  the  numbers 
till  10  without  a  mistake.  He  was  fond  of  doing  sums,  and  had 
initiated  this  game  himself  by  asking  :  "  Mother,  if  I  have  two 
apples  and  get  one  more,  haven't  I  then  three  ?"  His  sense  of 
numbers  was  so  abstract  that  he  was  caught  by  a  tricky  question  : 
"  If  you  have  two  eyes  and  one  nose,  how  man}^  ears  have  you  ?  " 
He  answered  at  once,  "  Three  !  "     A  child  thus  seems  to  think  in 


120  WORDS  [CH.  VI 

abstract  numbers,  and  as  he  learns  his  numbers  as  1,  2,  3,  4,  etc., 
not  as  one  pear,  two  pears,  three  pears,  one  may  well  be  skeptical 
about  the  justification  for  the  recommendation  made  by  many 
pedagogues  that  at  an  early  stage  of  the  school-life  a  child  should 
learn  to  reckon  with  concrete  things  rather  than  with  abstract 
numbers, 

A  child  will  usually  be  familiar  with  the  sound  of  higher 
numerals  long  before  it  has  any  clear  notion  of  Avhat  the)''  mean. 
Frans  (3.6)  said,  "  They  are  coming  by  a  train  that  is  called  four 
thirty-four,"  and  (4.4)  he  asked,  '"  How  much  is  tAvice  hundred  ? 
Is  that  a  thousand  ?  " 

A  child's  ideas  of  time  are  necessarily  extremely  vague  to 
begin  with ;  it  cannot  connect  verj^  clear  or  very  definite  notions 
with  the  expressions  it  constantly  hears  others  emplo}',  such  as 
'last  Sunday,'  'a  week  ago,'  or  'next  year.'  The  other  day  I 
heard  a  little  girl  say  :  "  This  is  where  we  sat  nert  time,"  evidently 
meaning  '  last  time.'  All  observers  of  children  mention  the 
frequent  confusion  of  words  like  to -morrouy  und  yesterday,  and  the 
linguist  remembers  that  Gothic  (jistradagis  means  '  to-morrow%' 
though  it  corresponds  formally  with  E.  yesterday  and  G.  gestern. 

VI.— §  6.  Various  Difficulties. 

Ver}?^  small  children  will  often  say  up  both  when  they  want 
to  be  taken  up  and  when  they  want  to  be  put  down  on  the  floor. 
This  generality  means  nothing  else  than  that  they  have  not  yet 
learnt  the  word  down,  and  up  to  them  simply  is  a  means  to  obtain 
a  change  of  position.  In  the  same  way  a  German  child  used  hut 
auf  for  having  the  hat  taken  off  as  well  as  put  on,  but  Meumann 
rightly  interprets  this  as  an  undifferentiated  desire  to  have  some- 
thing happen  with  the  hat.  But  even  with  somewhat  more 
advanced  children  there  are  curious  confusions. 

Hilary  M.  (2.0)  is  completely  baffled  by  words  of  opposite  mean- 
ing. She  will  say,  "  Daddy,  my  pinny  is  too  hot;  I  must  Avarm  it 
at  the  fire."  She  goes  to  the  fire  and  comes  back,  saying,  "  That's 
better  ;  it's  quite  cool  now."  (The  same  confusion  of  hot  and  cold 
was  also  reported  in  the  case  of  one  Danish  and  one  German  child  ; 
cf.  also  TracA',  p.  134.)  One  morning  while  dressing  she  said, 
"  What  a  nice  windy  day,"  and  an  hour  or  two  later,  before 
she  had  been  out,  "  What  a  nasty  windy  day."  She  confuses 
good  and  naughty  completely.  Tony  F.  (2.5)  saA^s,  "  Turn  the 
dark  out." 

Sometimes  a  mere  accidental  likeness  may  prove  too  nnich 
tor  the  child.  When  Hilary  M.  had  a  new  doll  (2.0)  her  mother 
said  to  her:  ''  And  is  that  your  son  ?"    Hilary  was  puzzled,  and 


§6]  VARIOUS  DIFFICULTIES  121 

looking  out  of  the  window  at  the  sun,  said  :  "  No,  that's  ray  sun." 
It  was  very  difficult  to  set  her  out  of  this  confusion.^  Her  sister 
Beth  (3.8),  looking  at  a  sunset,  said  :  "  That's  what  you  call  a  smi- 
set ;  where  Ireland  (her  sister)  is  (at  school)  it's  a  summerset." 
About  the  same  time,  when  staying  at  Longwoocl  Farm,  she  said  : 
"  I  suppose  if  the  trees  were  cut  down  it  would  be  Shortwood 
Farm  ?  " 

An  English  friend  \mtes  to  me  :  ''  I  misunderstood  the  text, 
'  And  there  fell  from  his  eyes  as  it  were  scales,'  as  I  knew  the  word 
scales  only  in  the  sense  '  balances.'  The  phenomenon  seemed  to 
me  a  strange  one,  but  I  did  not  question  that  it  occurred,  any 
more  than  I  questioned  other  strange  phenomena  recounted  in 
the  Bible.     In  the  lines  of  the  hymn — 

Teach  me  to  live  that  I  may  dread 
The  grave  as  httle  as  my  bed — 

I  supposed  that  the  words  '  as  little  as  my  bed  '  were  descriptive 
of  my  future  grave,  and  that  it  was  my  duty  according  to  the 
hymn  to  fear  the  grave." 

Words  with  several  meanings  may  cause  children  much  diffi- 
culty. A  Somerset  child  said,  "  Moses  was  not  a  good  boy,  and 
his  mother  smacked  'un  and  smacked  'un  and  smacked  'un  till 
she  couldn't  do  it  no  more,  and  then  she  put  'un  in  the  ark  of 
bulrushes."'  This  puzzled  the  teacher  till  he  looked  at  the  passage 
in  Exodus  :  "  And  when  she  could  hide  him  no  longer,  she  laid 
him  in  an  ark  of  bulrushes."  Here,  of  course,  we  have  technically 
two  different  words  hide ;  but  to  the  child  the  difficulty  is 
practically  as  great  where  we  have  what  is  called  one  and  the 
same  word  with  two  distinct  meanings,  or  when  a  word  is  used 
figuratively. 

The  word  '  cliild  '  means  two  different  things,  which  in  some 
languages  are  expressed  by  two  distinct  words.  I  remember  my 
own  astonishment  at  the  age  of  nine  when  I  heard  my  godmother 
talk  of  her  children.  "  But  you  have  no  children."  "  Yes,  Clara 
and  Eliza."     I  knew  them,  of  course,  but  they  were  grown  up. 

Take  again  the  word  old.  A  boy  loiew  that  he  was  three  years, 
but  could  not  be  induced  to  say  '  three  years  old ' ;  no,  he  is  three 
years  new,  and  his  father  too  is  new,  as  distinct  from  his  grand- 
mother, who  he  Icnows  is  old.  A  child  asked,  "  Why  have 
grand  dukes  and  grand  pianos  got  the  same  name  ?  "  (Glen- 
conner,  p.  21). 

When  Frans  was  told  (4.4)  "  Your  eyes  are  running,"  he  was 
much  astonished,  and  asked,  "  Are  they  running  away  ?  " 

1  Cf.  below  on  the  disappearance  of  the  word  807i  because  it  sounds  like 
3un  (Ch.  XV.  §  7). 


122  WORDS  [CH.  VI 

Sometimes  a  child  knows  a  word  first  in  some  secondary  sense. 
When  a  country  child  first  came  to  Copenhagen  and  saw  a  soldier, 
he  said,  "  There  is  a  tin-soldier  "  (2.0).  Stern  has  a  story  about 
his  daughter  who  was  taken  to  the  country  and  wished  to  pat 
the  backs  of  the  pigs,  but  was  checked  with  the  words,  "  Pigs 
alwaj's  lie  in  dirt,"  when  she  was  suddenly  struck  with  a  new  idea  ; 
"Ah,  that  is  why  they  are  called  pigs,  because  they  are  so  dirty  : 
but  what  would  people  call  them  if  thej'  didn't  lie  in  the  dirt  ?  " 
History  repeats  itself  :  only  the  other  day  a  teacher  wrote  to  me 
that  one  of  his  pupils  had  begun  his  essay  with  the  words  :  '"  Pigs 
are  rightly  called  thus,  for  they  are  such  swine." 

Words  of  similar  sound  are  apt  to  be  confused.  Some  children 
have  had  trouble  till  mature  years  with  soldier  and  shoulder, 
hassock  and  cassock,  diary  and  dairy.  Lady  Glenconner  WTites  : 
"They  almost  invariably  say  'lemon'  [for  melon],  and  if  they 
make  an  effort  to  be  more  correct  they  still  mispronounce  it, 
•  Don't  say  melling.'  '  Very  well,  then,  mellum.'  "  Among  other 
confusions  mentioned  in  her  book  I  may  quote  Portugal  for  '  pur- 
gatory,' I^ng  Solomon's  three  hundred  Columbines,  David  and 
his  great  friend  Johnson,  Cain  and  Mabel — all  of  them  shoeing 
how  words  from  spheres  beyond  the  ordinary  ken  of  children  are 
assimilated  to  more  familiar  ones. 

Schuchardt  has  a  story  of  a  little  coloured  bo}^  in  the  West 
Indies  who  said,  "  It's  three  hot  in  this  room  "  :  he  had  heard  too= 
two  and  literally  wanted  to  'go  one  better.'  According  to  Mr. 
James  Payne,  a  boy  for  years  substituted  for  the  words  '  Hallowed 
be  Thy  name  '  '  Harold  be  Th}-  name.'  Many  children  imagine 
that  there  is  a  i^ole  to  mark  where  the  North  Pole  is,  and  even 
(like  Helen  Keller)  that  polar  bears  climb  the  Pole. 

Tliis  leads  us  naturally  to  what  linguists  call  '  popular  ety- 
mology " — wliich  is  very  frequent  with  childi'en  in  all  countries. 
I  give  a  few  examples  from  books.  A  four-year-old  boy  had  heard 
several  times  about  his  nurse's  neuralgia,  and  finally  said  :  "I 
don't  think  it's  new  ralgia,  I  call  it  old  ralgia."  In  this  way 
anchovies  are  made  into  hamchotnes,  whirlwind  into  tvorldwind,  and 
holiday  into  hollorday,  a  day  to  holloa.  Professor  Sturtevant 
writes  :  A  boy  of  six  or  seven  had  frequently  had  his  ear  in-igated ; 
when  similar  treatment  was  applied  to  his  noee,  be  said  that  he 
had  been  '  nosigated  '—  he  had  evidently  given  his  own  inter- 
pretation to  the  first  syllable  of  irrigate. 

There  is  an  element  of  '  popular  etymology  '  in  the  following 
joke  which  was  made  by  one  of  the  Glenconner  children  when 
four  years  old  :  "I  suppose  you  wag  along  in  the  wagonette,  the 
landau  lands  you  at  the  door,  and  you  sweep  off  in  the  brougham  " 
(pronounced  broom). 


§  7]  SHIFTERS  128 

VI.— §  7.  Shifters. 

A  class  of  words  which  presents  grave  difficulty  to  children 
are  those  whose  meaning  differs  according  to  the  situation,  so 
that  the  child  hears  them  now  applied  to  one  thing  and  now  to 
another.  That  was  the  case  with  words  like  '  father,'  and 
'mother.'  Another  such  word  is  'enemy.'  When  Frans  (4.5) 
played  a  war-game  with  Eggert,  he  could  not  get  it  into  his  head 
that  he  was  Eggert's  enemy  :  no,  it  was  only  Eggert  who  was  the 
enemy.  A  stronger  case  still  is  '  home.'  When  a  child  was  asked 
if  his  grandmother  had  been  at  home,  and  answered  :  "  No,  grand- 
mother was  at  grandfather's,"  it  is  clear  that  for  him  '  at  home  ' 
meant  merely  '  at  my  home.'  Such  words  may  be  called  shifters. 
When  Frans  (3.6)  heard  it  said  that  '  the  one  '  (glove)  was  as 
good  as  '  the  other,'  he  asked,  "Which  is  the  one,  and  which  is  the 
other  ?  " — a  question  not  easy  to  answer. 

The  most  important  class  of  shifters  are  the  personal  pro- 
nouns. The  child  hears  the  word  '  I '  meaning  '  Father,'  then 
again  meaning  '  Mother,'  then  again  '  Uncle  Peter,'  and  so  on 
unendingly  in  the  most  confusing  manner.  Many  people  realize 
the  difficulty  thus  presented  to  the  child,  and  to  obviate  it  will 
speak  of  themselves  in  the  third  person  as  '  Father  '  or  '  Grannie  ' 
or  '  Mary,'  and  instead  gf  saying  '  you  '  to  the  child,  speak  of  it 
by  its  name.  The  child's  understanding  of  what  is  said  is  thus 
facilitated  for  the  moment :  but  on  the  other  hand  the  child  in 
this  way  hears  these  little  words  less  frequently  and  is  slower  in 
mastering  them. 

If  some  children  soon  learn  to  say  '  I  '  while  others  speak 
of  themselves  by  their  name,  the  difference  is  not  entirely  due 
to  the  different  mental  powers  of  the  children,  but  must  be 
largely  attributed  to  their  elders'  habit  of  addressing  them  by 
their  name  or  by  the  pronouns.  But  Germans  w^ould  not  be 
Germans,  and  philosophers  would  not  be  philosophers,  if  they  did 
not  make  the  most  of  the  child's  use  of  'I,'  in  which  they  see 
the  first  sign  of  self -consciousness.  The  elder  Fichte,  we  are  told, 
used  to  celebrate  not  his  son's  birthday,  but  the  day  on  which  he 
first  spoke  of  himself  as  'I.'  The  sober  truth  is,  I  take  it,  that 
a  boy  who  speaks  of  himself  as  '  Jack  '  can  have  just  as  full  and 
strong  a  perception  of  himself  as  opposed  to  the  rest  of  the  world 
as  one  who  has  learnt  the  little  linguistic  trick  of  saying  'I.' 
But  this  does  not  suit  some  of  the  great  psychologists,  as  seen 
from  the  following  quotation  :  "  The  child  uses  no  pronouns  ;  it 
speaks  of  itself  in  the  third  person,  because  it  has  no  idea  of  its 
'  I '  (Ego)  nor  of  its  '  Not-I,'  because  it  knows  nothing  of  itself 
nor  of  others." 


124  WORDS  [CH.  VI 

It  is  not  an  uncommon  case  of  confusion  for  a  child  to  use 
'  you  '  and  '  your  '  instead  of  '  I,'  '  me,'  and  '  mine.'  The  child 
has  noticed  that  '  will  you  have  ?  '  means  '  will  Jack  have  ?  '  so 
that  he  looks  on  '  you  '  as  synonymous  with  his  o^^^l  name.  In 
some  children  this  confusion  may  last  for  some  months.  It  is 
in  some  cases  connected  with  an  inverted  word-order,  '  do  you  ' 
meaning  'I  do' — an  instance  of  '  echoism  '  (see  below).  Some- 
times he  will  introduce  a  further  complication  by  using  the  per- 
sonal pronoun  of  the  third  person,  as  though  he  had  started  the 
sentence  with  '  Jack  ' — then  '  you  have  his  coat '  means  '  I  have 
my  coat.'  He  may  even  speak  of  the  person  addressed  as  'I.' 
'  Will  I  tell  a  story  ?  '  =  '  Will  you  tell  a  story  ?  '  Frans  was 
liable  to  use  these  confused  forms  between  the  ages  of  two  and 
two  and  a-half,  and  I  had  to  quicken  his  acquaintance  with 
the  right  usage  by  refusing  to  understand  him  when  he  used 
the  wrong.  Beth  M.  (2.6)  was  very  jealous  about  her  elder 
sister  touching  any  of  her  property,  and  if  the  latter  sat  on 
her  chair,  she  would  shriek  out :  "  That's  your  chair  ;  that's 
your  chair." 

The  forms  /  and  me  are  a  common  source  of  difficulty  to 
English  children.  Both  Tony  E.  (2.7  to  3.0)  and  Hilary  M.  (2.0) 
use  my  for  me  ;  it  is  apparently  a  kind  of  blending  of  me  and  /  ; 
e.g.  "  Give  Hilary  medicine,  make  my  better,"  "  Maggy  is  looking 
at  my,"  "  Give  it  my."  See  also  O'Shea,  p.  81  :  '  my  want  to  do 
this  or  that ;    my  feel  bad  ;    that  is  my  pencil  ;    take  my  to  bed.' 

His  and  her  are  difficult  to  distinguish  :  "  An  ill  ladj',  his  legs 
were  bad"  (Tony  E.,  3.3). 

C.  M.  L.  (about  the  end  of  her  second  year)  constantly'  used 
ivour  and  ivours  for  our  and  ours,  the  connexion  being  with  ive,  as 
'  your  '  with  you.    In  exactly  the  same  way  many  Danish  children 
say  vos  for  os  on  account  of  vi.     But  all  this  really  falls  imdcr  our  . 
next  chapter. 

VI.— §  8.  Extent  of  Vocabulary. 

The  number  of  words  which  the  child  has  at  command  is  con- 
stantly increasing,  but  not  uniformly,  as  the  increase  is  affected 
by  the  child's  health  and  the  new  experiences  which  life  presents 
to  him.  In  the  beginning  it  is  tolerably  easy  to  count  the  words 
the  child  uses ;  later  it  becomes  more  difficult,  as  there  are  times 
when  his  command  of  speech  grows  with  astonishing  rapidity. 
There  is  great  difference  between  individual  children.  Statistics 
have  often  been  given  of  the  extent  of  a  child's  vocabulary  at 
different  ages,  or  of  the  results  of  comparing  the  vocabularies  of 
a  number  of  children. 


§8]       EXTENT  OF  VOCABULARY       125 

All  American  child  who  was  closely  observed  by  his  mother, 
Mrs.  Winfield  S.  Hall,  had  in  the  tenth  month  3  words,  in  the 
eleventh  12,  in  the  twelfth  24,  in  the  thirteenth  38,  in  the  fourteenth 
48,  in  the  fifteenth  106,  in  the  sixteenth  199,  and  in  the  seventeenth 
232  words  {Child  Study  Monthly,  March  1897).  During  the  first 
month  after  the  same  boy  was  six  years  old,  slips  of  paper  and 
pencils  were  distributed  over  the  house  and  practically  every- 
thing which  the  child  said  was  written  down.  After  two  or  three 
days  these  were  collected  and  the  words  were  put  under  their 
respective  letters  in  a  book  kept  for  that  purpose.  New  sets  of 
papers  were  put  in  their  places  and  other  lists  made.  In  addition 
to  this,  the  record  of  his  life  during  the  past  year  was  examined 
and  all  of  his  words  not  already  listed  were  added.  In  this  way 
his  summer  vocabulaiy  was  obtained  ;  conversations  on  certain 
topics  were  also  introduced  to  give  him  an  opportunity  to  use 
words  relating  to  such  topics.  The  list  is  printed  in  the  Journal 
of  Childhood  and  Adolescence,  January  1902,  and  is  well  worth 
looking  through.  It  contains  2,688  words,  apart  from  proper 
names  and  numerals.  No  doubt  the  child  was  really  in  command 
of  words  beyond  that  total. 

This  list  perhaps  is  exceptional  on  account  of  the  care  with 
which  it  was  compiled,  but  as  a  rule  I  am  afraid  that  it  is  not  wise 
to  attach  much  importance  to  these  tables  of  statistics.  One  is 
generally  left  in  the  dark  whether  the  words  counted  are  those 
that  the  child  has  understood,  or  those  that  it  has  actually  used 
— two  entirely  different  things.  The  passive  or  receptive  know- 
ledge of  a  language  always  goes  far  beyond  the  active  or 
productive. 

One  also  gets  the  impression  that  the  observers  have  often 
counted  up  words  without  realizing  the  difficulties  involved.  What 
is  to  be  counted  as  a  word  ?  Are  /,  me,  we,  us  one  word  or  four  ? 
Is  teacup  a  new  word  for  a  child  who  already  knows  tea  and  cwp  ? 
And  so  for  all  compounds.  Is  box  (=  a  place  at  a  theatre)  the  same 
word  as  box  (=  workbox)  ?  Ai'e  the  two  thats  in  '  that  man  that  you 
see  '  two  words  or  one  ?  It  is  clear  that  the  process  of  counting 
involves  so  much  that  is  arbitrary  and  uncertain  that  very  little 
can  be  built  on  the  statistics  arrived  at. 

It  is  more  interesting  perhaps  to  determine  what  words  at 
a  given  age  a  child  does  not  know,  or  rather  does  not  understand 
when  he  hears  them  or  when  they  occur  in  his  reading.  I  have 
myself  collected  such  lists,  and  others  have  been  given  me  by 
teachers,  who  have  been  astonished  at  words  which  their  classes 
did  not  understand.  A  teacher  can  never  be  too  cautious  about 
assuming  linguistic  knowledge  in  his  pupils — and  this  applies  not 
only  to  foreign  words,  about  wliich  all  teachers  are  on  the  alert, 


12G  WORDS  [oil.  VI 

but  also  to  what  seem  to  be  quite  everyday  words  of  the  language 
of  the  country. 

In  connexion  with  the  growth  of  vocabulary  one  may  ask 
how  many  words  are  possessed  by  the  average  grown-up  man  ? 
Max  Miiller  in  his  Lectures  stated  on  the  authority  of  an  English 
clergyman  that  an  English  farm  labourer  has  only  about  three 
hundred  words  at  command.  This  is  the  most  utter  balderdash, 
but  nevertheless  it  has  often  been  repeated,  even  by  such  an 
authority  on  psychology  as  Wundt.  A  Danish  boy  can  easily 
learn  seven  hundred  English  words  in  the  first  year  of  his  study 
of  the  language — and  are  we  to  believe  that  a  grown  Englishman, 
even  of  the  lowest  class,  has  no  greater  stock  than  such  a  beginner  ? 
If  you  go  through  the  list  of  2,000  to  3,000  words  used  by  the  Ameri- 
can boy  of  six  referred  to  above,  you  will  easily  convince  yourself 
that  they  would  far  from  suffice  for  the  rudest  labourer.  A  Swedish 
dialectologist,  after  a  minute  investigation,  found  that  the  vocabu- 
lary of  Swedish  peasants  amounted  to  at  least  26,000  words, 
and  his  view  has  been  confirmed  by  other  investigators.  This 
conclusion  is  not  invalidated  by  the  fact  that  Shakespeare  in  his 
works  uses  only  about  20,000  words  and  IMilton  in  his  poems 
only  about  8,000.  It  is  easy  to  see  what  a  vast  number  of  words 
of  daily  life  are  seldom  or  never  required  by  a  poet,  especially 
a  poet  like  Milton,  whose  works  are  on  elevated  subjects.  The 
words  used  by  Zola  or  Kipling  or  Jack  London  would  no  doubt 
far  exceed  those  used  by  Shakespeare  and  Milton. ^ 

VI. — §9.  Summary. 

To  sum  up,  then.  There  are  only  very  few  words  that  are 
explained  to  the  child,  and  so  long  as  it  is  quite  small  it  will  not 
even  understand  the  explanations  that  might  be  given.  Some  it 
learns  because,  when  the  word  is  used,  the  object  is  at  the  same 
time  pointed  at,  but  most  words  it  can  only  learn  by  drawing 
conclusions  about  their  meaning  from  the  situation  in  which  they 
arise  or  from  the  context  in  which  they  are  used.  These  con- 
clusions, however,  are  very  uncertain,  or  they  may  be  correct  for 
the  particular  occasion  and  not  hold  good  on  some  other,  to  the 
child's  mind  quite  similar,  occasion.  Grown-up  people  are  in  the 
same  position  with  regard  to  words  they  do  not  know,  but  which 
they  come  across  in  a  book  or  newspaper,  e.g.  demise.  The  mean- 
ings of  many  words  are  at  the  same  time  extraordinarily  vague 
and  yet  so  strictly  limited  (at  least  in  some  respects)  that  the  least 
deviation  is  felt  as  a  mistake.  Moreover,  the  child  often  learns 
a  secondary  or  figurative  meaning  of  a  word  before  its  simple 
*  Cf.  the  fuller  treatment  of  this  question  in  GS  ch.  ix. 


§  9]  SUMMARY  127 

meaning.  But  gradually  a  high  degree  of  accuracy  is  obtained, 
the  fittest  meanings  surviving— that  is  (in  this  connexion)  those 
that  agree  best  with  those  of  the  surrounding  society.  And  thus 
the  individual  is  merged  in  society,  and  the  social  character  of 
language  asserts  itself  through  the  elimination  of  everything  that 
is  the  exclusive  property  of  one  person  only. 


CHAPTER  VII 
GRAMMAR 

§  1.  Introductory.  §  2.  Substantives  and  Adjectives.  §  3.  Verbs.  §  4.  De- 
grees of  Consciousness.  §  5.  Word-formation.  §  6.  Word-division. 
§  7.  Sentences.  §  8.  Negation  and  Question.  §  9.  Prepositions  and 
Idioms. 

Vn. — §  1.  Introductory. 

To  learn  a  language  it  is  not  enough  to  know  so  many  words. 
They  must  be  connected  according  to  the  particular  laws  of  the 
particular  language.  No  one  tells  the  child  that  the  plural  of 
'  hand  '  is  hands,  of  '  foot '  feet,  of  '  man  '  men,  or  that  the  past 
of  '  am  '  is  ivas,  of  '  love  '  loved ;  it  is  not  informed  when  to  say 
he  and  when  him,  or  in  what  order  words  must  stand.  How  can 
the  little  fellow  learn  all  this,  Avhich  when  set  forth  in  a  grammar 
fills  many  pages  and  can  only  be  explained  by  help  of  many 
learned  words  ? 

Many  people  will  say  it  comes  by  '  instinct,'  as  if  '  instinct ' 
were  not  one  of  those  fine  words  which  are  chiefly  used  to  cover 
over  what  is  not  understood,  because  it  says  so  precious  little  and 
seems  to  say  so  precious  much.  But  when  other  people,  using  a 
more  everyday  expression,  say  that  it  all  '  comes  quite  of  itself,' 
I  must  strongly  demur  :  so  far  is  it  from  '  coming  of  itself  '  that 
it  demands  extraordinary  labour  on  the  child's  part.  The  count- 
less grammatical  mistakes  made  by  a  child  in  its  early  j^ears  are* 
a  tell-tale  proof  of  the  difficulty  which  this  side  of  language  presents 
to  him — especially,  of  course,  on  account  of  the  imsystematic 
character  of  our  flexions  and  the  irregularity  of  its  so-called 
'  rules  '  of  syntax. 

(  At  first  each  word  has  only  one  form  for  the  cliild,  but  he 
poon  discovers  that  growTi-up  people  use  many  forms  which 
Resemble  one  another  in  different  connexions,  and  he  gets  a  sense 
of  the  purport  of  these  forms,  so  as  to  be  able  to  imitate  them 
himself  or  even  develop  similar  forms  of  his  own.  These  latter 
fprms  are  what  linguists  call  analogy-formations  :  by  analogy 
with  '  Jack's  hat  '  and  '  father's  hat '  the  child  invents  such  as 
•  uncle's  hat '  and  '  Charlie's  hat ' — and  inasmuch  as  these  forms 
arc  '  correct,*  no  one  can  say  on  hearing  them  whether  the  child 

198 


§  1]  INTRODUCTORY  129 

has  really  invented  them  or  has  first  heard  them  used  by  others. 
It  is  just  on  account  of  the  fact  that  the  forms  developed  on  the 
spur  of  the  moment  by  each  individual  are  in  the  vast  majority 
of  instances  perfectly  identical  with  those  used  already  by  other 
people,  that  the  principle  of  analogy  comes  to  have  such  paramount 
importance  in  the  life  of  language,  for  we  are  all  thereby  driven 
to  apply  it  unhesitatingly  to  all  those  instances  in  which  we  have 
no  ready-made  form  handy  :  without  being  conscious  of  it,  each 
of  us  thus  now  and  then  really  creates  something  never  heard 
before  by  us  or  anybody  else. 


VII. — §  2.  Substantives  and  Adjectives. 

The  -s  of  the  possessive  is  so  regular  in  English  that  it  is  not 
difficult  for  the  child  to  attach  it  to  all  words  as  soon  as  the 
character  of  the  termination  has  dawned  upon  him.  But  at  first 
there  is  a  time  with  many  children  in  which  words  are  put  together 
without  change,  so  that  '  Mother  hat '  stands  for  '  Mother's  hat ' ; 
cf.  also  sentences  like  "  Baby  want  baby  milk." 

After  the  5-form  has  been  learnt,  it  is  occasionally  attached  to 
pronouns,  as  ■i/ou's  for  '  your,'  or  more  rarely  7'<s  or  me's  for  '  my.* 

The  -5  is  now  in  English  added  freely  to  whole  groups  of  words, 
as  in  the  King  of  England's  power,  where  the  old  construction  was 
the  King's  jjoioer  of  England,  and  in  Beaumont  and  Fletcher's  plays 
(see  on  the  historical  development  of  this  group  genitive  my 
ChE  iii.).  In  Danish  we  have  exactly  the  same  construction, 
and  Danish  children  will  very  frequently  extend  it,  placing  the 
-s  at  the  end  of  a  whole  interrogative  sentence,  e.g.,  '  Hvem  er 
det  da's  ?  '  (as  if  in  English,  '  Who  is  it  then's,'  instead  of  '  Whose 
is  it  then  ?  ').  Dr.  H.  Bradley  once  wrote  to  me  :  "  One  of  your 
samples  of  children's  Danish  is  an  exact  parallel  to  a  bit  of  child's 
English  that  I  noted  long  ago.  My  son,  when  a  little  boy,  used 
to  say  '  Who  is  that-'s '  (with  a  pause  before  the  s)  for  '  Whom 
does  that  belong  to  ?  '  " 

Irregular  plurals  are  often  regularized,  gooses  for  '  geese,' 
tooths,  knifes,  etc  O'Shea  mentions  one  child  who  inversely 
formed  the  plural  chieves  for  chiefs  on  the  analogy  of  thieves. 

Sometimes  the  child  becomes  acquainted  with  the  plural  form 
first,  and  from  it  forms  a  singular.  I  have  noticed  this  several 
times  with  Danish  children,  who  had  heard  the  irregular  plural 
k;(er,  '  cows,'  and  then  would  say  en  kef  instead  of  en  ko  (while 
others  from  the  singular  ko  form  a  regular  plural  koer).  French 
children  will  say  un  chevau  instead  of  un  cheval. 

In  the  comparison  of  adjectives  analogy-formations  are 
frequent  vnth.  all  children,  e.g.  the  littlest,  littler,  goodest,  baddest, 

9 


180  GRAMMAR  [ch.  vii 

splendider,  etc.  One  child  is  reported  as  saying  quicklier,  another 
as  saying  qiiickerly,  instead  of  the  received  more  qtiickly.  A  curious 
fonaation  is  "  P'raps  it  was  John,  but  p'rapser  it  was  Marj'." 

O'Shea  (p.  108)  notices  a  period  of  transition  when  the  child 
may  use  the  analogical  form  at  one  moment  and  the  traditional 
one  the  next.  Thus  8.  (4.0)  will  say  better  perhaps  five  times 
where  he  says  gooder  once,  but  in  times  of  excitement  he  will 
revert  to  the  latter  form. 


Vn.— §  3.  Verbs. 

The  child  at  first  tends  to  treat  all  verbs  on  the  analogy  of 
love,  loved,  loved,  or  kiss,  kissed,  kissed,  thus  catched,  buyed,  frowed 
for  '  caught,  bought,  threw  or  thrown,'  etc.,  but  gradually  it  learns 
the  irregular  forms,  though  in  the  beginning  ^^ith  a  good  deal  of 
hesitation  and  confusion,  as  done  for  '  did,'  Imnged  for  '  hung,' 
etc.  O'Shea  gives  among  other  sentences  (p.  94)  :  "I  drunked 
my  milk."  "  Budd  sivunged  on  the  rings."  "  Grandpa  boughted 
me  a  ring."  "  I  caughted-  him."  "  Aunt  Ket  earned  to-day." 
"  He  gaved  it  to  me  " — in  all  of  which  the  irregular  form  has  been 
supplemented  \vith  the  regular  ending. 

A  little  Danish  incident  may  be  thus  rendered  in  English. 
The  child  (4.G):  "I  have  seed  a  chestnut."  ''Where  have  you 
seen  it  ?  "  He  :  "I  seen  it  in  the  garden."  This  shows  the 
influence  of  the  form  last  heard. 

I  once  heard  a  French  child  say  "Ha  pleuvy  "  for  '  plu  '  from 
'  pleuvoir.'  Other  analogical  forms  are  prendu  for  '  pris  '  ;  a^sire 
for  '  asseoir  '  (from  the  participle  assis),  se  taiser  for  '  se  taire  ' 
(from  the  frequent  injmiction  taisez-vous).  Similar  formations  are 
frequent  in  all  countries. 

vn. — §4.  Degrees  of  Consciousness. 

Do  the  little  brains  think  about  these  different  forms  and  their 
uses  ?  Or  is  the  learning  of  language  performed  as  unconsciously 
as  the  circulation  of  the  blood  or  the  process  of  digestion  ?  Clearly 
they  do  not  think  about  grammatical  forms  in  the  way  piu'sued 
in  grammar-lessons,  with  all  the  forms  of  the  same  word  arranged 
side  by  side  of  one  another,  Mith  rules  and  exceptions.  Still  there 
is  much  to  lead  us  to  believe  that  the  thing  does  not  go  of  itself 
without  some  thinking  over.  The  fact  that  in  lat^r  years  we 
speak  our  language  without  knowing  how  we  do  it,  the  right  words 
and  phrases  coming  to  us  no  one  knows  how  or  whence,  is  no 
proof  that  it  was  always  so.  We  ride  a  bicycle  without  giving 
a  thought  to  the  machine,  look  around  us,  talk  with  a  friend, 


§4]  DEGREES   OF   CONSCIOUSNESS  181 

etc.,  and  yet  there  was  a  time  when  every  movement  had  to  be 
mastered  by  slow  and  painful  efforts.  There  would  be  nothing 
strange  in  supposing  that  it  is  the  same  with  the  acquisition  of 
language. 

Of  course,  it  would  be  idle  to  ask  children  straight  out  if  they 
think  about  these  things,  and  what  they  think.  But  now  and 
then  one  notices  something  which  shows  that  at  an  early  age 
they  think  about  points  of  grammar  a  good  deal.  When  Frans 
was  2.9,  he  lay  in  bed  not  kno^nng  that  anyone  was  in  the  next 
room,  and  he  was  heard  to  say  quite  plainlj-^ :  "  Sma  haender 
hedder  det — lille  hand — sma  haender — lille  haender,  nse  sma 
haender."  {"  They  are  called  small  hands — little  hand — small 
hands — little  hands,  no,  small  hands  "  :  in  Danish  lille  is  not  used 
with  a  plural  noim.)  Similar  things  have  been  related  to  me  by 
other  parents,  one  child,  for  instance,  practising  plural  forms 
while  turning  over  the  leaves  of  a  picture-book,  and  another  one, 
who  was  corrected  for  saving  yiak  instead  of  nikkede  ('  nodded  '), 
immediately  retorted  "  Stikker  stak,  nikker  nak,"  thus  showing 
on  what  analogy  he  had  formed  the  new  preterit.  Frequently 
childi-en,  after  giving  a  form  which  their  own  ears  tell  them  is 
wrong,  at  once  correct  it :    'I  sticked  it  in — I  stuck  it  in.' 

A  German  child,  not  yet  two,  said  :  '"  Papa,  hast  du  mir 
was  mitgebrino:t  — s;ebrungen — gebracht  ?  "  almost  at  a  breath 
(Gabelentz),  and  another  (2.5)  said  hausin,  but  then  hesitated 
and  added  :    "  Man  kann  auch  hauser  sagen  "  (Meringer), 

Vn.— §5.  Word-formation. 

In  the  forming  of  words  the  child's  brain  is  just  as  active. 
In  many  cases,  again,  it  will  be  impossible  to  distinguish  between 
what  the  child  has  heard  and  merely  copied  and  what  it  has  itself 
fashioned  to  a  given  pattern.  If  a  child,  for  example,  uses  the 
word  '  kindness,'  it  is  probable  that  he  has  heard  it  before,  but 
it  is  not  certain,  because  he  might  equally'  well  have  formed  the 
word  himself.  If,  however,  we  hear  him  say  '  kindhood,'  or 
'  kindship,'  or  '  «adeness,'  "  broadness,'  '  stupidness,'  wc  know 
for  certain  that  he  has  made  the  word  up  himself,  because  the 
resultant  differs  from  the  form  used  in  the  language  he  hears 
aroimd  him.  A  child  who  does  not  know  the  word  '  spade  '  may 
call  the  tool  a  digger  ;  he  may  speak  of  a  lamp  as  a  shine.  He 
may  say  it  sans  when  the  sun  is  shining  (cf .  it  rains),  or  ask  his 
mother  to  sauce  his  pudding.  It  is  quite  natiu-al  that  the  enormous 
number  of  nouns  and  verbs  of  exactly  the  same  form  in  English 
{blossom,  care,  drink,  end,  fight,  fish,  ape,  hand,  dress,  etc.)  should 
induce  children  to  make  new  verbs  according  to  the  same  pattern  ; 


132  GRAMMAR  [cii.  ^^I 

I  quote  a  few  of  the  examples  given  by  O'Shea  :  "  I  am  going  to 
basket  these  apples."  "  I  pailed  him  out  "  (took  a  turtle  out  of 
a  washtub  with  a  pail).  "  I  needled  him  "  (put  a  needle  through 
a  fly). 

Other  words  are  formed  b}''  means  of  derivative  endings,  as 
sorrified,  lessoner  (O'Shea  32),  flyahle  (able  to  fly,  Glenconner  3)  ; 
"  This  tooth  ought  to  come  out,  because  it  is  crookening  the  others  " 
(a  ten -year-old,  told  me  by  Professor  Ayres).  Compound  nouns, 
too,  may  be  freely  formed,  such  as  wind-ship,  eye-curtain  (O'Shea), 
a  fun-copy  of  Romeo  and  Juliet  (travesty,  Glenconner  19). 
Bryan  L.  (ab.  5)  said  springklers  for  chrysalises  ('  because  they 
wake  up  in  the  spring  '). 

Sometimes  a  child  will  make  up  a  new  word  through  '  blend- 
ing '  two,  as  when  Hilary  M.  (1.8  to  2)  spoke  of  rubbish  =  th^ 
rubhQV  to  -polish  the  boots,  or  of  the  backet,  from  bat  and  racquet. 
Beth  M.  (2.0)  used  breakolate,  from  fereaHast  and  chocolate,  and 
Chally  as  a  child's  name,  a  compound  of  two  sisters,  Chanty  and 
Sally. 

VII.— §6.  Word-division. 

We  are  so  accustomed  to  see  sentences  in  waiting  or  print 
with  a  little  space  left  after  each  word,  that  we  have  got  alto- 
gether WTong  conceptions  of  language  as  it  is  spoken.  Here  words 
follow  one  another  without  the  least  pause  till  the  speaker 
hesitates  for  a  word  or  has  come  to  the  end  of  what  he  has  to 
saJ^  '  Not  at  all '  sounds  like  '  not  a  tall.'  It  therefore  requires 
in  many  cases  a  great  deal  of  comparison  and  analysis  on  the 
part  of  the  child  to  find  out  Avhat  is  one  and  what  two  or  three 
words.  We  have  seen  before  that  the  question  '  How  big  is  the 
boy  ?  '  is  to  the  child  a  single  expression,  beyond  his  powers  of 
analysis,  and  to  a  much  later  age  it  is  the  same  \vith  other  phrases. 
The  child,  then,  may  make  false  divisions,  and  either  treat  a  group 
of  words  as  one  word  or  one  word  as  a  group  of  words.  A  girl 
(2 . 6)  used  the  term  '  Tanobijeu '  whenever  she  wished  her 
younger  brother  to  get  out  of  her  way.  Her  parents  finall}'^  dis- 
covered that  she  had  caught  up  and  shortened  a  phrase  that 
some  older  children  had  used — '  'Tend  to  j^our  own  business  ' 
(O'Shea). 

A  child,  addressing  her  cousin  as  '  Aunt  Katie,'  was  told  "  I 
am  not  Aunt  Katie,  I  am  merely  Katie."  Next  day  she  said  : 
"  Good-morning,  Aunt  merelj^-Katie  "  (translated).  A  child  who 
had  been  praised  with  the  words,  '  You  are  a  good  boy,'  said  to 
his  mother,  "You're  a  good  boy,  mother"  (2.8). 

Cecil  H.  (4.0)  came  back  from  a  party  and  said  that  she  had 
been  given  something    very   nice   to  eat.      "  What    was    it  ?  " 


§  6]  WORD-DIVISION  133 

"  Rats."  "  No,  no."  "  Well,  it  was  mice  then."  She  had  been 
asked  if  she  would  have  '  some-ice,'  and  had  taken  it  to  be  '  some 
mice.'  S.  L.  (2.6)  constantly  used  ^  ababana'  for  'banana'; 
the  form  seems  to  have  come  from  the  question  "  Will  you 
have  a  banana  ?  "  but  was  used  in  such  a  sentence  as  "  May  I 
have  an  ababana  ?  "  Children  will  often  say  napple  for  apple 
through  a  misdivision  of  an-apple,  and  normous  for  enormotts ; 
cf.  Ch.  X  §  2. 

A  few  examples  may  be  added  from  children's  speech  in  other 
countries.  Ronjat's  child  said  nesey  for  '  echelle,'  starting 
from   u'ne   echelle ;   Grammont's    child   said    U7i   tarbre,  starting 

from  cet  arbre,  and  ce  nos  for  '  cet  os,'  from  vn  os  ;  a  German  child 
said  motel  for  '  hotel,'  starting  from  the  combination  '  im  (h)  otel ' 

(Stern).  Many  German  children  say  arrhoe,  because  they  take 
the  first  syllable  of  '  diarrhoe  '  as  the  feminine  article.  A  Dutch 
child  heard  the  phrase  '  'k  weet  't  niet '  ('  I  don't  know  ') ,  and  said 
"  Papa,  hij  kweet  't  niet  "  (Van  Ginneken).  A  Danish  child  heard 
liis  father  say, '"  Jeg  skal  op  i  ministeriet  "  (''  I'm  going  to  the  Govern- 
ment office  "),  and  took  the  fii'st  syllable  as  min  (my)  ;  consequently 
he  asked,  "  Skal  du  i  dinisteriet  ?  "  A  French  child  was  told  that 
they  expected  Munkacsy  (the  celebrated  painter,  in  French  pro- 
nounced as  Mon-),  and  asked  his  aunt :  "  Est-ce  que  ton  Kdcsy 
ne  viendra  pas  ?  "  Antoinette  K.  (7.),  in  reply  to  "  C'est  bien,  je 
te  felicite,"  said,  "  Eh  bien,  moi  je  ne  te  fais  pas  licite." 

The  German  '  Ich  habe  antgewortet '  is  obviously  on  the  analogy 
of  angenommen,  etc.  (Meringer).  Danish  children  not  unfrequently 
take  the  verb  telefonere  as  two  words,  and  in  the  interrogative 
form  will  place  the  personal  pronoun  in  the  middle  of  it,  '  Tele 
hun  fonerer  ?  '  ('  Does  she  telephone  V)  A  girl  asked  to  see  ele 
mer  fant  (as  if  in  English  she  had  said  '  ele  more  phant ').  Cf. 
'  Give  me  more  Jiundier-cap  '  for  '  Give  me  a  greater  handicap  ' 
— in  a  foot-race  (O'Shea  108). 

Vn.— §7.  Sentences. 

In  the  first  period  the  child  knows  nothing  of  grammar  :  it 
does  not  connect  words  together,  far  less  form  sentences,  but  each 
word  stands  by  itself.  '  Up  '  means  what  we  should  express  by 
a  whole  sentence,  '  I  want  to  get  up,'  or  '  Lift  me  up  '  ;  '  Hat ' 
means  '  Put  on  my  hat,'  or  '  I  want  to  put  my  hat  on,'  or  '  I  have 
my  hat  on,'  or  '  Mamma  has  a  new  hat  on  '  ;  '  Father  '  can  be 
either  '  Here  comes  Father,'  or  '  This  is  Father,'  or  '  He  is  called 
Father,'  or  '  I  want  Father  to  come  to  me,'  or  '  I  want  this  or 
that  from  Father.'  This  particular  group  of  sounds  is  vaguely 
associated  with  the  mental  pictm-e  of  the  person  in  question, 


184  GRAMMAR  [ch.  vii 

and  is  uttered  at  the  sight  of  him  or  at  the  mere  wish  to  see  him 
or  something  else  in  connexion  with  him. 

When  we  say  that  such  a  word  means  what  we  should  express 
by  a  whole  sentence,  this  does  not  amount  to  saying  that  the 
child's  '  Up  '  is  a  sentence,  or  a  sentence-word,  as  many  of  those 
who  have  wiitten  about  these  questions  have  said.  We  might 
just  as  well  assert  that  clapping  our  hands  is  a  sentence,  because 
it  expresses  the  same  idea  (or  the  same  frame  of  mind)  that  is 
otherwise  expressed  by  the  whole  sentence  '  This  is  splendid.' 
The  word  '  sentence  '  presupposes  a  certain  grammatical  structure, 
which  is  wanting  in  the  child's  utterance. 

Many  investigators  have  asserted  that  the  child's  first  utter- 
ances are  not  means  of  imparting  information,  but  always  an 
expression  of  the  child's  wishes  and  requirements.  This  is  cer- 
tainly somewhat  of  an  exaggeration,  since  the  child  quite  clearly 
can  make  known  its  joy  at  seeing  a  hat  or  a  plaything,  or  at 
merely  being  able  to  recognize  it  and  remember  the  word  for  it ; 
but  the  statement  still  contains  a  great  deal  of  truth,  for  without 
strong  feelings  a  child  would  not  say  much,  and  it  is  a  great 
stimulus  to  talk  that  he  very  soon  discovers  that  he  gets  his  wishes 
fulfilled  more  easily  when  he  makes  them  known  by  means  of 
certain  sounds. 

Frans  (1.7)  was  accustomed  to  express  his  longings  in  general 
by  help  of  a  long  m  with  rising  tone,  while  at  the  same  time 
stretching  out  his  hand  towards  the  particular  thing  that  he 
longed  for.  This  he  did,  for  example,  at  dinner,  when  he  wanted 
water.  One  day  his  mother  said,  "  Now  see  if  you  can  say  vand 
(water),"  and  at  once  he  said  what  was  an  approach  to  the  word, 
and  was  delighted  at  getting  something  to  di-ink  by  that  means. 
A  moment  later  he  repeated  what  he  had  said,  and  was  inexpressibly 
delighted  to  have  found  the  password  which  at  once  brought  him 
something  to  drink.  This  was  repeated  several  times.  Next  day, 
when  his  father  was  pouring  out  water  for  himself,  the  boy  again 
said  '  van,'  '  van,'  and  was  duly  rewarded.  He  had  not  heard 
the  word  during  the  intervening  twenty-four  hours,  and  nothing 
had  been  done  to  remind  him  of  it.  After  some  repetitions  (for 
he  only  got  a  few  di-ops  at  a  time)  he  pronounced  the  word  for 
the  first  time  quite  correctly.  The  daj'  after,  the  same  thing 
occurred  ;  the  word  was  never  heard  but  at  dinner.  When  he 
became  rather  a  nuisance  with  his  constant  cries  for  water,  his 
mother  said  :  "  Say  please  " — and  immediately  came  his  "  Bebe 
vand  "  ("  Water,  please  ") — his  first  attempt  to  put  two  words 
together. 

Later — in  this  formless  period — the  child  puts  more  and  more 
words  together,  often  in  quite  haphazard  order  :    '  My  go  snow  ' 


§  7]  SENTENCES  185 

(I  want  to  go  out  into  the  snow'),  etc.  A  Danish  child  of  2.1 
said  the  Danish  words  (imperfectly  pronounced,  of  course)  corre- 
sponding to  '"Oh  papa  lamp  mother  boom,"  when  his  mother  had 
struck  his  father's  lamp  with  a  bang.  Another  child  said  "  Papa 
hen  corn  cap  "  when  he  saw  his  father  give  corn  to  the  hens  out 
of  his  cap. 

When  Frans  was  1 .  10,  passing  a  post-office  (which  Danes  call 
'  posthouse  '),  he  said  of  his  own  accord  the  Danish  words  for 
'  post,  house,  bring,  letter  '  (a  pause  between  the  successive  words) 
— I  suppose  that  the  day  before  he  had  heard  a  sentence  in  which 
these  words  occurred.  In  the  same  month,  when  he  had  thrown 
a  ball  a  long  way,  he  said  what  would  be  in  English  '  dat  was 
good.'  This  was  not  a  sentence  which  he  had  put  together  for 
himself,  but  a  mere  repetition  of  what  had  been  said  to  him,  clearly 
conceived  as  a  whole,  and  equivalent  to  '  bravo.'  Sentences  of 
this  kind,  however,  though  taken  as  units,  prepare  the  way  for 
the  understanding  of  the  words  '  that '  and  '  was  '  when  they  turn 
up  in  other  connexions. 

One  thing  which  plays  a  great  role  in  children's  acquisition 
of  language,  and  especially  in  their  early  attempts  to  form  sen- 
tences, is  Echoism  :  the  fact  that  children  echo  what  is  said  to 
them.  When  one  is  learning  a  foreign  language,  it  is  an  excellent 
method  to  try  to  imitate  to  oneself  in  silence  every  sentence  which 
one  hears  spoken  by  a  native.  By  that  means  the  turns  of  phrases, 
the  order  of  words,  the  intonation  of  the  sentence  are  firmly  fixed 
in  the  memory — so  that  they  can  be  recalled  when  required,  or 
rather  recur  to  one  quite  spontaneously  without  an  effort.  What 
the  grown  man  does  of  conscious  purpose  our  childi'en  to  a  large 
extent  do  without  a  thought — that  is,  they  repeat  aloud  what 
they  have  just  heard,  either  the  whole,  if  it  is  a  very  short  sentence, 
or  more  commonly  the  conclusion,  as  much  of  it  as  they  can  retain 
in  their  short  memories.  The  result  is  a  matter  of  chance — it 
need  not  always  have  a  meaning  or  consist  of  entu'e  words.  Much, 
clearly,  is  repeated  without  being  understood,  much,  again,  without 
being  more  than  half  understood.    Take,  for  example  (translated) : 

Shall  I  carry  you  ? — Frans  (1.9)  :  Carry  you. 

Shall  Mother  carry  Frans  ? — Carry  Frans. 

The  sky  is  so  blue. — So  boo. 

I  shall  take  an  umbrella. — Take  rella. 

Though  this  feature  in  a  child's  mental  history  has  been  often 
noticed,  no  one  seems  to  have  seen  its  full  significance.  One  of 
the  acutest  observers  (Meixmann,  p.  28)  even  says  that  it  has  no 
importance  in  the  development  of  the  child's  speech.  On  the 
contrary,  I  think  that  Echoism  exj)lains  very  much  indeed.  First 
let  us  bear  in  mmd  the  mutilated  forms  of  words  which  a  child 


13G  GRAMMAR  [ch.  vii 

uses  :  ^chiiie  for  machine,  'gar  for  cigar,  Trix  for  Beatrix,  etc. 
Then  a  child's  frequent  use  of  an  indirect  form  of  question  rather 
than  direct,  '  Why  you  smoke,  Father  ?  '  which  can  hardly  be 
explained  except  as  an  echo  of  sentences  like  '  Tell  me  why  you 
smoke.'  This  plays  a  greater  role  in  Danish  than  in  English, 
and  the  corresponding  form  of  the  sentence  has  been  frequently 
remarked  by  Danish  parents.  Another  feature  which  is  nearlj' 
constant  with  Danish  children  at  the  age  when  echoing  is  habitual 
is  the  inverted  word  order  :  this  is  used  after  an  initial  adverb 
{nu  kommer  hun,  etc.),  but  the  child  will  use  it  in  all  cases  {kommer 
hun,  etc.).  Further,  the  extremely  frequent  use  of  the  infinitive, 
because  the  child  hears  it  towards  the  end  of  a  sentence,  where 
it  is  dependent  on  a  preceding  can,  or  may,  or  must.  '  Not  eat 
that '  is  a  child's  echo  of  '  You  mustn't  eat  that.'  In  German 
this  has  become  the  ordinary  form  of  official  order  :  "  Nicht 
hinauslehnen  "  ("Do  not  lean  out  of  the  window"). 


VII. — §8.  Negation  and  Question. 

Most  children  learn  to  say  '  no  '  before  they  can  say  '  j^es ' 
— simply  because  negation  is  a  stronger  expression  of  feeling  than 
affirmation.  Many  little  children  use  nenenene  (short  i)  as  a 
natural  expression  of  fretfulness  and  discomfort.  It  is  perhaps 
so  natural  that  it  need  not  be  learnt :  there  is  good  reason  for 
the  fact  that  in  so  many  languages  words  of  negation  begin  with 
n  (or  m).  Sometimes  the  n  is  heard  without  a  vowel :  it  is  only 
the  gesture  of  '  turning  up  one's  nose  '  made  audible. 

At  first  the  child  does  not  express  what  it  is  that  it  does 
not  want — it  merely  puts  it  away  with  its  hand,  pushes  away, 
for  example,  what  is  too  hot  for  it.  But  when  it  begins  to  express 
in  words  what  it  is  that  it  will  not  have,  it  does  so  often  in  the 
form  '  Bread  no,'  often  with  a  pause  between  the  words,  as  two 
separate  utterances,  as  when  we  might  say,  in  our  fuller  forms  of 
expression  :  '  Do  you  offer  me  bread  ?  I  won't  hear  of  it.'  So 
with  verbs  :  '  I  sleep  no.'  Thus  with  many  Danish  children, 
and  I  find  the  same  phenomenon  mentioned  Avith  regard  to  children 
of  different  nations.  Tracy  saj's  (p.  136) :  "  Negation  was  expressed 
by  an  affirmative  sentence,  with  an  emphatic  no  tacked  on  at 
the  end,  exactly  as  the  deaf-mutes  do."  The  blind-deaf  Helen 
Keller,  when  she  felt  her  little  sister's  mouth  and  her  mother 
spelt  '  teeth  '  to  her,  answered  :  "  Baby  teeth — no,  baby  eat — 
no,"  i.e.,  bab}^  cannot  eat  because  she  has  no  teeth.  In  the  same 
way,  in  German,  '  Stul  nei  nei — schossel,'  i.e.,  I  won't  sit  on  the 
chair,  but  in  your  lap,  and  in  French,  '  Papa  abeie  ato  non,  iaian 
abeie  non,'  i.e.,  Papa  n'est  pas  encore  habille,  Suzanne  n'est  pas 


§8]  NEGATION   AND    QUESTION  137 

habillee  (Stern,  189,  203).     It  seems  thus  that  this  mode  of  expres- 
sion will  crop  up  everywhere  as  an  emphatic  negation. 

Interrogative  sentences  come  generally  rather  early — it  would 
be  better  to  say  questions,  because  at  ftrst  they  do  not  take  the 
form  of  interrogative  sentences,  the  interrogation  being  expressed 
by  bearing,  look  or  gesture  :  when  it  begins  to  be  expressed  by 
intonation  we  are  on  the  way  to  question  expressed  in  speech. 
Some  of  the  earliest  questions  have  to  do  with  place  :  '  Where 
is  .  .  .  ?  '  The  child  very  often  hears  such  sentences  as  '  Where 
is  its  little  nose  ?  '  which  ai-e  not  really  meant  as  questions  ;  we 
may  also  remark  that  questions  of  this  type  are  of  great  practical 
importance  for  the  little  thing,  who  soon  uses  them  to  beg  for 
something  which  has  been  taken  away  from  him  or  is  out  of  his 
reach.     Other  early  questions  are  '  What's  that  ?  '  and  '  Who  ?  ' 

Later — generally,  it  would  seem,  at  the  close  of  the  third  year 
— questions  with  '  why  '  crop  up  :  these  are  of  the  utmost  impor- 
tance for  the  child's  understanding  of  the  whole  world  and  its 
manifold  occurrences,  and,  however  tiresome  they  may  be  when 
they  come  in  long  strings,  no  one  who  wishes  well  to  his  child 
will  venture  to  discourage  them.  Questions  about  time,  such  as 
'  When  ?  How  long  ?  '  appear  much  later,  owing  to  the  child's 
difficulty  in  acqumng  exact  ideas  about  time. 

Children  often  find  a  difficulty  in  double  questions,  and  when 
asked  '  Will  you  have  bro-wTi  bread  or  white  ?  '  merely  answer 
the  last  word  with  '  Yes.'  So  in  reply  to  '  Is  that  red  or  yellow  ?  ' 
'Yes'  means  'yellow'  (taken  from  a  child  of  4.11).  I  think 
this  is  an  instance  of  the  short  memories  of  children,  who  have 
already  at  the  end  of  the  question  forgotten  the  beginning,  but 
Professor  Mawer  thinks  that  the  real  difficulty  here  is  in  making 
a  choice  :  they  cannot  decide  between  alternatives  :  usually  they 
are  silent,  and  if  they  say  '  Yes  '  it  only  means  that  they  do  not 
want  to  go  without  both  or  feel  that  they  must  say  something. 

Vn.— §  9.  Prepositions  and  Idioms. 

Prepositions  are  of  very  late  growth  in  a  child's  language. 
Much  attention  has  been  given  to  the  point,  and  Stern  has  collected 
statistics  of  the  ages  at  which  various  children  have  first  used 
prepositions:  the  earliest  age  is  1.10,  the  average  age  is  2.3. 
It  does  not,  however,  seem  to  me  to  be  a  matter  of  much  interest 
how  early  an  individual  word  of  some  particular  grammatical 
class  is  first  used  ;  it  is  much  more  interesting  to  follow  up  the 
gradual  growth  of  the  child's  command  of  this  class  and  to  see 
how  the  first  inevitable  mistakes  and  confusions  arise  in  the 
little  brain.     Stern  makes  the  interesting  remark  that  when  the 


138  GRAMMAR  [cii.  vii 

tendency  to  use  preiDositions  first  appears,  it  grows  far  more 
rapidly  than  the  power  to  discriminate  one  preposition  from 
another  ;  with  his  own  children  there  came  a  time  when  thej'^ 
employed  the  same  word  as  a  sort  of  universal  preposition  in  all 
relations.  Hilda  used  vo7i,  Eva  ai(f.  I  have  never  observed 
anything  corresponding  to  this  among  Danish  childi-en. 

All  children  start  by  putting  the  words  for  the  most  important 
concepts  together  without  connective  words,  so  '  Leave  go  bed- 
room '  ('  Ma}^  I  have  leave  to  go  into  the  bedroom  ? '),  '  Out  road  ' 
('  I  am  going  out  on  the  road  ').  The  first  use  of  prepositions  is 
always  in  set  phrases  learnt  as  wholes,  like  '  go  to  school,'  '  go  to 
pieces,'  '  lie  in  bed,'  '  at  dinner.'  Not  till  later  comes  the  power 
of  using  prepositions  in  free  combinations,  and  it  is  then  that 
mistakes  appear.  Nor  is  this  surprising,  since  in  all  languages 
prepositional  usage  contains  much  that  is  peculiar  and  arbitrary, 
chiefly  because  when  we  once  pass  beyond  a  few  quite  clear  applica- 
tions of  time  and  place,  the  relations  to  be  expressed  become  so 
vague  and  indefinite,  that  logicall}'  one  preposition  might  often 
seem  just  as  right  as  another,  although  usage  has  laid  down  a 
fast  law  that  this  preposition  must  be  used  in  this  case  and  that 
in  another.  I  noted  down  a  great  number  of  mistakes  my  own 
boy  made  in  these  words,  but  in  all  cases  I  was  able  to  find  some 
synonymous  or  antonymous  expression  in  which  the  preposition 
used  would  have  been  the  correct  one,  and  which  may  have  been 
vaguely  before  his  mind. 

The  multiple  meanings  of  prepositions  sometimes  have  strange 
results.  A  little  girl  w^as  in  her  bath,  and  hearing  her  mother 
say  :  "  I  will  wash  you  in  a  moment,"  answered  :  "No,  you  must 
wash  me  in  the  bath  '"  !  She  was  led  astray  by  the  two  uses  of 
in.  We  know  of  the  child  at  school  who  was  asked  "  What  is  an 
average  ?  "  and  said  :  "  What  the  hen  lays  eggs  on."'  Even  men 
of  science  are  similarly  led  astray  by  prepositions.  It  is  perfectly 
natural  to  say  that  something  has  passed  over  the  threshold  of 
consciousness  :  the  metaphor  is  from  the  waj^  in  which  you  enter 
a  house  by  stepping  over  the  threshold.  If  the  metaphor  were 
kept,  the  opposite  situation  would  be  expressed  by  the  statement 
that  such  and  such  a  thing  is  outside  the  threshold  of  conscious- 
ness. But  psj'chologists,  in  the  thoughtless  way  of  little  children, 
take  under  to  be  always  the  opposite  of  over,  and  so  speak  of  things 
'  lying  under  (or  below)  the  threshold  of  our  consciousness,'  and  have 
even  invented  a  Latin  word  for  the  unconscious,  viz.  subliminal.^ 

^  H.  Q.  Wells  writes  (Soul  of  a  Bishop,  94)  :  "  He  was  lugging  things 
now  into  speech  that  so  far  had  been  scarcely  above  the  threshold  of  his  conscious 
thought."  Here  we  see  the  wrong  interpretation  of  the  preposition  over 
dragging  with  it  the  synonym  above. 


§9]  PREPOSITIONS   AND    IDIOMS  139 

Children  may  use  verbs  with  an  object  which  require  a  pieposi- 
tion  (■  Will  you  wait  me  ?  '),  or  which  are  only  used  intransitively 
('  Will  you  jamj)  me  ? '),  or  they  may  mix  up  an  infinitival  with  a 
direct  construction  ('  Could  you  hear  me  sneezed  ? ').  But  it  is 
surely  needless  to  multiply'  examples. 

When  many  years  ago,  in  my  Progress  in  Language,  I  spoke 
of  the  advantages,  even  to  natives,  of  simplicity  in  linguistic 
structure,  Professor  Herman  Moller,  in  a  learned  review,  objected 
to  me  that  to  the  adult  learning  a  foreign  tongue  the  chief  difficulty 
consists  in  "  the  countless  chicaneries  due  to  the  tyrannical  and 
capricious  usage,  whose  tricks  there  is  no  calculating  ;  but  these 
offer  to  the  native  child  no  such  difficulty  as  morphology  may," 
and  again,  in  speaking  of  the  choice  of  various  prepositions,  which 
is  far  from  easy  to  the  foreigner,  he  says  :  "  But  any  considerable 
mental  exertion  on  the  part  of  the  native  child  learning  its 
mother-tongue  is  here,  of  course,  out  of  the  question."  Such 
assertions  as  these  cannot  be  founded  on  actual  observation  ;  at 
anj-  rate,  it  is  my  experience  in  listening  to  children's  talk  that 
long  after  they  have  reached  the  point  where  they  make  hardly 
any  mistake  in  pronunciation  and  verbal  forms,  etc.,  they  are 
still  capable  of  using  many  turns  of  speech  which  are  utterly 
opposed  to  the  spirit  of  the  language,  and  which  are  in  the  main 
of  the  same  kind  as  those  Avhich  foreigners  are  apt  to  fall  into. 
Many  of  the  child's  mistakes  are  due  to  mixtures  or  blendings  of 
two  turns  of  expression,  and  not  a  few  of  them  may  be  logically 
justified.  But  learning  a  language  implies  among  other  things 
learning  what  you  may  not  say  in  the  language,  even  though 
no  reasonable  ground  can  be  given  for  the  prohibition. 


CHAPTER  VTII 
SOME    FUNDAMENTAL    PROBLEMS 

§  1.  Why  is  the  Native  Language  learnt  so  well  ?  §  2.  Natural  Ability 
and  Sex.  §  3.  Mother-tongue  and  Other  Tongue.  §  4.  Plajing  at 
Language.  §  5.  Secret  Languages.  §  6.  Onomatopoeia.  §  7.  Word- 
inventions.     §8.  'Mamma'  and  'Papa.' 

Vm.— §  1.  Why  is  the  Native  Language  learnt  so  well  ? 

How  does  it  happen  that  children  in  general  learn  their  mother- 
tongue  so  well  ?  That  this  is  a  problem  becomes  clear  when  we 
contrast  a  child's  fu-st  acquisition  of  its  mother-tongue  with  the 
later  acquisition  of  any  foreign  tongue.  The  contra^^t  is  indeed 
striking  and  manifold  :  here  we  have  a  quite  little  child,  without 
experience  or  prepossessions  ;  there  a  bigger  child,  or  it  may  be 
a  grown-up  person  with  all  sorts  of  knowledge  and  powers  :  here  a 
haphazard  method  of  procedure ;  there  the  whole  task  laid  out  in 
a  system  (for  even  in  the  schoolbooks  that  do  not  follow  the  old 
grammatical  system  there  is  a  certain  definite  order  of  progress 
from  more  elementary  to  more  difficult  matters)  :  here  no  pro- 
fessional teachers,  but  chance  parents,  brothers  and  sisters,  nursery- 
maids and  playmates ;  there  teachers  trained  for  many  years 
specially  to  teach  languages  :  here  only  oral  instruction  ;  there  not 
only  that,  but  reading-books,  dictionaries  and  other  assistance. 
And  yet  this  is  the  result :  here  complete  and  exact  command 
of  the  language  as  a  native  speaks  it,  however  stupid  the  children  ; 
there,  in  most  cases,  even  with  people  otherA^ise  highly  gifted,  a 
defective  and  inexact  command  of  the  language.  On  what  does 
this  difference  depend  ? 

The  problem  has  never  been  elucidated  or  canvassed  from  all 
sides,  but  here  and  there  one  finds  a  jDartial  answer,  often  given 
out  to  be  a  complete  answer.  Often  one  side  of  the  question  only 
is  considered,  that  which  relates  to  sounds,  as  if  the  whole  problem 
had  been  solved  when  one  had  fomid  a  reason  for  children  acquiring 
a  better  pronunciation  of  their  mother-tongue  than  one  generally 
gets  in  later  life  of  a  foreign  speech. 

Manj''  people  accordingly  tell  us  that  chilcb-en's  organs  of  speech 
are  especially  flexible,  but  that  this  suppleness  of  the  tongue  and 
lips  is  lost  in  later  life.     This  explanation,  however,  does  not  hold 

no 


§1]  THE  NATIVE  LANGUAGE  141 

water,  as  is  shown  sufficiently  by  the  countless  mistakes  in  sound 
made  by  children.  If  their  organs  were  as  flexible  as  is  pretended, 
they  could  learn  sounds  correctly  at  once,  while  as  a  matter  of 
fact  it  takes  a  long  time  before  all  the  sounds  and  groups  of  sounds 
are  imitated  with  tolerable  accm-acy.  Suppleness  is  not  some- 
thing which  is  original,  but  something  acquired  later,  and  acquired 
with  no  small  difficulty,  and  then  only  with  regard  to  the  sounds 
of  one's  own  language,  and  not  universall3^ 

The  same  applies  to  the  second  answer  (given  by  Bremer, 
Deutsche  Phonetik,  2),  namely,  that  the  child's  ear  is  especially 
sensitive  to  impressions.  The  ear  also  requires  development, 
since  at  first  it  can  scarcely  detect  a  number  of  nuances  which  we 
gro'UTi-up  people  hear  most  distinctly. 

Some  people  say  that  the  reason  why  a  child  learns  its  native 
language  so  well  is  that  it  has  no  established  habits  to  contend 
against.  But  that  is  not  right  either  :  as  any  good  observer  can 
see,  the  process  by  which  the  child  acquires  sounds  is  pm'sued 
through  a  continuous  struggle  against  bad  habits  which  it  has 
acquired  at  an  earlier  stage  and  wliich  may  often  have  rooted 
themselves  remarkably  fii-mly. 

Sweet  (H  19)  says  among  other  things  that  the  conditions  of 
learning  vernacular  sounds  are  so  favourable  because  the  child 
has  nothing  else  to  do  at  the  time.  On  the  contrary,  one  may  say 
that  the  child  has  an  enormous  deal  to  do  while  it  is  learning  the 
language  ;  it  is  at  that  time  active  beyond  all  belief  :  in  a  short 
time  it  subdues  Mdder  tracts  than  it  ever  does  later  in  a  much 
longer  time.  The  more  wonderful  is  it  that  along  with  those 
tasks  it  finds  strength  to  learn  its  mother-tongue  and  its  many 
refinements  and  crooked  turns. 

Some  point  to  heredity  and  say  that  a  child  learns  that  language 
most  easily  which  it  is  disposed  beforehand  to  learn  by  its  ancestry, 
or  in  other  words  that  there  are  inherited  convolutions  of  the 
brain  which  take  in  this  language  better  than  any  other.  Perhaps 
there  is  sometliing  in  this,  but  we  have  no  definite,  carefully  ascer- 
tained facts.  Against  the  theory  stands  the  fact  that  the  children 
of  immigrants  acquire  the  language  of  their  foster-country  to 
all  appearance  just  as  surely  and  quickly  as  children  of  the  same 
age  whose  forefathers  have  been  in  the  country  for  ages.  This 
may  be  observed  in  England,  in  Denmark,  and  still  more  in  North 
America.     Environment  clearly  has  greater  influence  than  descent. 

The  real  answer  in  my  opinion  (which  is  not  claimed  to  be 
absolutely  new  in  every  respect)  lies  partly  in  the  child  itself, 
partly  in  the  behaviour  towards  it  of  the  people  around  it.  In 
the  fu-st  place,  the  time  of  learning  the  mother-tongue  is  the  most 
favourable  of  all,  namely,  the  first  years  of  life.    If  one  assumes 


142  SOME   FUNDA^IENTAL   PROBLEMS    [ch.  viii 

that  mental  endowment  means  the  capacity  for  development, 
without  doubt  all  children  are  best  endowed  in  their  first  years  : 
from  biith  onwards  there  is  a  steady  decline  in  the  power  of  grasping 
what  is  new  and  of  accommodating  oneself  to  it.  With  some 
this  decline  is  a  very  rapid  one — they  quickly  become  fossilized 
and  unable  to  make  a  change  in  their  habits  ;  with  others  one 
can  notice  a  happy  power  of  development  even  in  old  age  ;  but 
no  one  keeps  very  long  in  its  full  range  the  adaptability  of  his 
first  years. 

Further,  we  must  remember  that  the  child  has  far  more 
abundant  opportunities  of  hearing  his  mother-tongue  than  one 
gets,  as  a  rule,  with  any  language  one  learns  later.  He  hears  it 
from  morning  to  night,  and,  be  it  noted,  in  its  genuine  shape, 
with  the  right  pronunciation,  right  intonation,  right  use  of  words 
and  right  syntax  :  the  language  comes  to  him  as  a  fresh,  ever- 
bubbling  spring.  Even  before  he  begins  to  say  an3'-thing  himself, 
his  first  understanding  of  the  language  is  made  easier  by  the  habit 
that  mothers  and  nurses  have  of  repeating  the  same  phrases  with 
slight  alterations,  and  at  the  same  time  doing  the  thing  which 
they  are  talking  about.  '"  Now  we  must  wash  the  little  face,  now 
we  must  wash  the  little  forehead,  now  we  must  wash  the  little 
nose,  now  we  must  wash  the  little  chin,  now  we  must  wash  the 
little  ear,"  etc.  If  men  had  to  attend  to  their  children,  they  would 
never  use  so  many  words — but  in  that  case  the  child  would  scarcelj' 
learn  to  understand  and  talk  as  soon  as  it  does  when  it  is  cared 
for  by  women. ^ 

Then  the  child  has,  as  it  were,  private  lessons  in  its  mother- 
tongue  all  the  year  round.  There  is  nothing  of  the  kind  in  the 
learning  of  a  language  later,  when  at  most  one  has  six  hours  a 
week  and  generally  shares  them  \^^th  others.  The  child  has  another 
priceless  advantage  ;  he  hears  the  language  in  all  possible  situations 
and  under  such  conditions  that  language  and  situation  ever 
correspond  exactly  to  one  another  and  mutually  illustrate  one 
another.     Gesture  and  facial  expression  harmonize  with  the  words 

*  Women  know 
The  way  to  rear  up  children,  (to  be  just) 
They  know  a  simple,  merry,  tender  knack 
Of  stringing  pretty  words  that  make  no  sense, 
And  kissing  full  sense  into  empty  words, 
Which  things  are  corals  to  cut  life  upon, 
Although  such  trifles  :   children  learn  by  such 
Love's  holy  earnest  in  a  pretty  play 
And  get  not  over-early  solemnized  .  .  . 
Such  good  do  mothers.     Fathers  love  as  well 
— Mine  did,  I  know — but  still  with  heavier  brains, 
And  wills  more  consciouslj^  responsible, 
And  not  as  wisely,  since  less  foolishly. 

Elizabeth  Browning  :  Aurora  Leigh,  10. 


§1]  THE  NATIVE  LANGUAGE  148 

uttered  and  keep  the  child  to  a  right  understanding.  Here  there 
is  nothing  unnatural,  such  as  is  often  the  case  in  a  language-lesson 
in  later  years,  when  one  talks  about  ice  and  snow  in  June  or 
excessive  heat  in  January,  And  what  the  child  hears  is  just  what 
immediately  concerns  him  and  interests  him,  and  again  and  again 
his  own  attempts  at  speech  lead  to  the  fulfilment  of  his  dearest 
wishes,  so  that  his  command  of  language  has  great  practical 
advantages  for  him. 

Along  with  what  he  himself  sees  the  use  of,  he  hears  a  great 
deal  which  does  not  directly  concern  him.  but  goes  into  the  little 
brain  and  is  stored  up  there  to  turn  up  again  later.  Nothing  is 
heard  but  leaves  its  traces,  and  at  times  one  is  astonished  to 
discover  what  has  been  preserved,  and  with  what  qKactness.  One 
day,  when  Frans  was  4.11  old,  he  suddenly  said:  "Yesterday — 
isn't  there  some  who  say  yesterday  1  "  (giving  yesterday  with  the 
correct  English  pronunciation),  and  when  I  said  that  it  was  an 
English  word,  he  went  on  :  "  Yes,  it  is  Mrs.  B.  :  she  often  says 
like  that,  yesterday."  Now,  it  was  three  weeks  since  that  lady 
had  called  at  the  house  and  talked  English.  It  is  a  well-known 
fact  that  hypnotized  persons  can  sometimes  say  whole  sentences 
in  a  language  which  they  do  not  loiow,  but  have  merely  heard  in 
childhood.  In  books  about  children's  language  there  are  many 
remarkable  accounts  of  such  linguistic  memories  which  had  lain 
buried  for  long  stretches  of  time.  A  child  who  had  spent  the 
first  eighteen  months  of  its  life  in  Silesia  and  then  came  to  Berlin, 
where  it  had  no  opportunity  of  hearing  the  Silesian  pronunciation, 
at  the  age  of  five  suddenly  came  out  with  a  number  of  Silesian 
expressions,  which  could  not  after  the  most  careful  investigation 
be  traced  to  any  other  source  than  to  the  time  before  it  could  talk 
(Stern,  257  fif.).  Grammont  has  a  story  of  a  little  French  girl, 
whose  nurse  had  talked  French  with  a  strong  Italian  accent ;  the 
child  did  not  begin  to  si)eak  till  a  month  after  this  nurse  had  left, 
but  pronounced  many  words  Avith  Italian  sounds,  and  some  of 
these  peculiarities  stuck  to  the  child  till  the  age  of  three. 

We  may  also  remark  that  the  baby's  teachers,  though,  regarded 
as  teachers  of  language,  they  may  not  be  absolutely  ideal,  still 
have  some  advantages  over  those  one  encounters  as  a  rule  later  in 
life.  The  relation  between  them  and  the  child  is  far  more  cordial 
and  personal,  just  because  they  are  not  teachers  first  and  foremost. 
They  are  immensely  interested  in  every  little  advance  the  child 
makes.  The  most  awkward  attempt  meets  with  sjnnpathy,  often 
vnih.  admiration,  while  its  defects  and  imperfections  never  expose 
it  to  a  breath  of  unkind  criticism.  There  is  a  Slavonic  proverb, 
"  If  you  wish  to  talk  well,  you  must  murder  the  language  first." 
But  this  is  very  often  overlooked  by  teachers  of  language,  who 


144  SOME  FUNDAMENTAL   PROBLEMS     [cii.  viii 

demand  faultless  accuracy  from  the  beginning,  and  often  keep 
their  pupils  grinding  so  long  at  some  little  part  of  the  subject  that 
their  desire  to  learn  the  language  is  weakened  or  gone  for  good. 
There  is  nothing  of  this  sort  in  the  child's  first  learning  of  his 
language. 

It  is  here  that  our  distinction  between  tlie  two  periods  comes 
in,  that  of  the  child's  own  separate  '  little  language  '  and  that 
of  the  common  or  social  language.  In  the  first  period  the  little 
one  is  the  centre  of  a  narrow  circle  of  his  own,  which  waits  for 
each  little  syllable  that  falls  from  his  lips  as  though  it  were  a 
grain  of  gold.  What  teachers  of  languages  in  later  years  would 
rejoice  at  hearing  such  forms  as  we  saw  before  used  in  the  time 
of  the  child's  '  little  language,'  fant  or  vat  or  ham  for  'elephant '  ? 
But  the  mother  really  does  rejoice :  she  laughs  and  exults  when 
he  can  use  these  syllables  about  his  toj'^-elephant,  she  throws  the 
cloak  of  her  love  over  the  defects  and  mistakes  in  the  little  one's 
imitations  of  words,  she  remembers  again  and  again  what  his 
strange  sounds  stand  for,  and  her  eager  sympathy  transforms 
the  first  and  most  difficult  stej^s  on  the  path  of  language  to  the 
merriest  game. 

It  Avould  not  do,  however,  for  the  child's  '  little  language  '  and 
its  dreadful  mistakes  to  become  fixed.  This  might  easily  happen, 
if  the  child  were  never  out  of  the  narrow  circle  of  its  own  family, 
which  knows  and  recognizes  its  'little  language.'  But  this  is 
stopi^cd  because  it  comes  more  and  more  into  contact  with  others — 
uncles  and  aunts,  and  especially  little  cousins  and  playmates  : 
more  and  more  often  it  hap]3ens  that  the  mutilated  words  are  not 
understood,  and  are  corrected  and  made  fun  of,  and  the  child 
is  incited  in  this  way  to  steady  improvement :  the  '  little  language  ' 
gradually  gives  place  to  the  '  common  language,'  as  the  child 
becomes  a  member  of  a  social  group  larger  than  that  of  his  own 
little  home. 

We  have  now  probably  found  the  chief  reasons  why  a  child 
learns  his  mother-tongue  better  than  even  a  grown-up  person 
who  has  been  for  a  long  time  in  a  foreign  country  learns  the 
language  of  his  environment.  But  it  is  also  a  contributory  reason 
that  the  child's  linguistic  needs,  to  begin  Avith,  are  far  more  limited 
than  those  of  the  man  who  wishes  to  be  able  to  talk  about  any- 
thing, or  at  any  rate  about  something.  Much  more  is  also  lin- 
guistically required  of  the  latter,  and  he  must  have  recourse  to 
language  to  get  all  his  needs  satisfied,  while  the  baby  is  well  looked 
after  even  if  it  says  nothing  but  waivaivqwa.  So  the  baby  has 
longer  time  to  store  up  his  impressions  and  continue  his  experi- 
ments, until  by  trying  again  and  again  he  at  length  gets  his  lesson 
learnt  in  all  its  tiny  details,  while  the  man  in  the  foreign  country, 


§1]  THE  NATIVE  LANGUAGE  145 

who  must  make  himself  understood,  as  a  rule  goes  on  trying  only 
till  he  has  acquired  a  form  of  speech  which  he  finds  natives  under- 
stand :  at  this  point  he  will  generally  stop,  at  any  rate  as  far  as 
pronunciation  and  the  construction  of  sentences  are  concerned 
(while  his  vocabulary  may  be  largely  increased).  But  this  '  just 
recognizable  '  language  is  incorrect  in  thousands  of  small  details, 
and,  inasmuch  as  bad  little  habits  quickly  become  fixed,  the 
kind  of  language  is  produced  which  we  know  so  well  in  the  case 
of  resident  foreigners — who  need  hardly  open  their  lips  before 
everyone  knows  they  are  not  natives,  and  before  a  practised  ear 
can  detect  the  country  they  hail  from.^ 

Vm.— §  2.  Natural  Ability  and  Sex. 

An  important  factor  in  the  acquisition  of  language  which  we 
have  not  considered  is  naturally  the  individuality  of  the  child. 
Parents  are  apt  to  draw  conclusions  as  to  the  abilities  of  their 
young  hopeful  from  the  rapidity  with  wliich  he  learns  to  talk  ; 
but  those  who  are  in  despair  because  their  Tommy  cannot  say  a 
single  ^v•ord  when  their  neighbours'  Harry  can  saj'^  a  great  deal 
may  take  comfort.  SlowTiess  in  talking  may  of  course  mean  defi- 
ciency of  ability,  or  even  idiocy,  but  not  necessarily.  A  child 
who  chatters  early  may  remain  a  chatterer  all  his  life,  and  children 
whose  motto  is  '  Slow  and  sure  '  may  turn  out  the  deepest,  most 
independent  and  most  trustworthy  characters  in  the  end.  There 
are  some  children  who  cannot  be  made  to  say  a  single  word  for  a 
long  time,  and  then  suddenly  come  out  with  a  whole  sentence, 
which  shows  how  much  has  been  quietly  fructifying  in  their  brain. 
Carlyle  was  one  of  these  :  after  eleven  months  of  taciturnity  he 
heard  a  child  cry,  and  astonished  all  by  sajdng,  "  What  ails  wee 
Jock  ?  "  Edmund  Gosse  has  a  similar  story  of  his  own  childhood, 
and  other  examples  have  been  recorded  elsewhere  (Meringer,  194 ; 
Stern,  257). 

^  This  is  not  the  place  to  speak  of  the  way  in  which  prevalent  methods 
of  teaching  foreign  languages  can  be  improved.  A  slavish  copying  of  the 
manner  in  which  English  children  learn  English  is  impracticable,  and  if 
it  were  practicable  it  would  demand  more  time  than  anyone  can  devote 
to  the  purpose.  One  has  to  make  the  most  of  the  advantages  which  the 
pupils  possess  over  babies,  thus,  their  being  able  to  read,  their  power  of  more 
sustained  attention,  etc.  Phonetic  explanation  of  the  new  sounds  and 
phonetic  transcription  have  done  wonders  to  overcome  difficulties  of  pro- 
nunciation. But  in  other  respects  it  is  possible  to  some  extent  to  assimilate 
the  teaching  of  a  foreign  language  to  the  method  piu-sued  by  the  child  in 
its  first  years  :  one  should  not  merely  sprinkle  the  pupil,  but  plunge  him 
right  down  into  the  sea  of  language  and  enable  him  to  swim  by  himself  as 
soon  as  possible,  relying  on  the  fact  that  a  great  deal  will  arrange  itself  in 
the  brain  without  the  inculcation  of  too  many  special  rules  and  explanations. 
For  details  I  may  refer  to  my  book,  How  to  Teach  a  Foreign  Language  {honAon, 
George  Allen  and  Unwin). 

10 


146  SOME  FUNDAMENTAL   PROBLEMS    [ch.  viii 

The  linguistic  development  of  an  individual  child  is  not  always 
in  a  steady  rising  line,  but  in  a  series  of  waves.  A  child  who 
seems  to  have  a  boundless  power  of  acquiring  language  suddenly 
stands  still  or  even  goes  back  for  a  short  time.  The  cause  may  be 
sickness,  cutting  teeth,  learning  to  walk,  or  often  a  removal  to 
new  surroundings  or  an  open-air  life  in  summer.  Under  such 
circumstances  even  the  word  '  I  '  may  be  lost  for  a  time. 

Some  children  develop  very  rapidly  for  some  years  until  they 
have  reached  a  certain  point,  where  they  stop  altogether,  while 
others  retain  the  power  to  develop  steadily  to  a  much  later  age. 
It  is  the  same  with  some  races  :  negro  children  in  American  schools 
may,  while  they  are  little,  be  up  to  the  standard  of  their  white 
schoolfellows,  whom  they  cannot  cojtc  with  in  later  life. 

The  two  sexes  diflFer  very  greatly  in  regard  to  speech — as  in 
regard  to  most  other  things.  Little  girls,  on  the  average,  learn 
to  talk  earlier  and  more  quickly  than  boys  ;  they  outstrip  them 
in  talking  correctly ;  their  pronunciation  is  not  spoilt  by  the  many 
bad  habits  and  awkwardnesses  so  often  found  in  boys.  It  has 
been  proved  by  statistics  in  many  countries  that  there  are  far 
more  stammerers  and  bad  speakers  among  boys  and  men  than 
among  girls  and  women.  The  general  receptivity  of  women,  their 
great  power  of,  and  pleasure  in,  imitation,  their  histrionic  talent, 
if  one  may  so  say — all  this  is  a  help  to  them  at  an  early  age,  so  that 
they  can  get  into  other  people's  way  of  talking  with  greater  agility 
than  boys  of  the  same  age. 

Everytliing  that  is  conventional  in  language,  everything  in 
which  the  only  thing  of  importance  is  to  be  in  agreement  with 
those  around  you,  is  the  girls'  strong  point.  Boys  may  often 
show  a  certain  reluctance  to  do  exactly  as  others  do  :  the  pecu- 
liarities of  their  '  little  language  '  are  retained  by  them  longer 
than  by  girls,  and  they  will  sometimes  steadily  refuse  to  correct 
their  own  abnormalities,  which  is  very  seldom  the  case  with  girls. 
Gaucherie  and  originality  thus  are  two  points  between  which  the 
speech  of  boys  is  constantly  oscillating.     Cf.  below,  Ch.  XIII. 

Vm.— §3.  Mother-tongue  and  Other  Tongue. 

The  expression  "  mother-tongue  "  should  not  be  understood 
too  literally :  the  language  which  the  child  acquires  naturally 
is  not,  or  not  alwa}'-^,  his  mother's  language.  When  a  mother 
speaks  with  a  foreign  accent  or  in  a  pronounced  dialect,  her  children 
as  a  rule  speak  their  language  as  correctly  as  other  children,  or 
keep  only  the  slightest  tinge  of  their  mother's  peculiarities.  I 
have  seen  this  very  distinctly  in  many  Danish  families,  in  wnich 
the  mother  has  kept  up  her  Norwegian  language  all  her  life,  and  in 


§  3]  MOTHER-TONGUE  AND  OTHER  TONGUE  147 

which  the  children  have  spoken  pure  Danish.  Thus  also  in  two 
families  I  know,  in  which  a  strong  Swedish  accent  in  one  mother, 
and  an  unmistakable  American  pronunciation  in  the  other,  have 
not  prevented  the  children  from  speaking  Danish  exactly  as  if 
their  mothers  had  been  born  and  bred  in  Denmark.  I  cannot, 
therefore,  agree  with  Passy,  who  says  that  the  child  learns  his 
mother's  sound  system  (Ch  §  32),  or  with  Dauzat's  dictum  to  the 
same  effect  (V  20).  The  father,  as  a  rule,  has  still  less  influence  ; 
but  what  is  decisive  is  the  speech  of  those  with  whom  the  child 
comes  in  closest  contact  from  the  age  of  three  or  so,  thus  frequently 
servants,  but  even  more  eflfoctually  playfellows  of  his  own  age 
or  rather  slightly  older  than  himself,  with  whom  he  is  constantly 
thrown  together  for  hours  at  a  time  and  whose  prattle  is  constantly 
in  his  ears  at  the  most  impressionable  age,  while  he  may  not  see 
and  hear  his  father  and  mother  except  for  a  short  time  every  day, 
at  meals  and  on  such  occasions.  It  is  also  a  well-known  fact 
that  the  children  of  Danish  parents  in  Greenland  often  learn  the 
Eskimo  language  before  Danish  ;  and  Meinhof  says  that  German 
cliildren  in  the  African  colonies  will  often  learn  the  language  of 
the  natives  earlier  than  German  (MSA  139). 

This  is  by  no  means  depreciating  the  mother's  influence,  which 
is  strong  indeed,  but  chiefly  in  the  first  period,  that  of  the  child's 
'  little  language.'  But  that  is  the  time  when  the  child's  imitative 
power  is  weakest.  His  exact  attention  to  the  minutiae  of  language 
dates  from  the  time  when  he  is  thrown  into  a  wider  circle  and 
has  to  make  himself  understood  by  many,  so  that  his  language 
becomes  really  identical  with  that  of  the  community,  where 
formerly  he  and  his  mother  would  rest  contented  with  what  they, 
but  hardly  anyone  else,  could  understand. 

The  influence  of  children  on  children  cannot  be  overestimated.^ 
Boys  at  school  make  fun  of  any  peculiarities  of  speech  noticed  in 
schoolfellows  who  come  from  some  other  part  of  the  country. 
Kipling  tells  us  in  Stalky  and  Co.  how  Stalky  and  Beetle  carefully 
kicked  McTurk  out  of  his  Irish  dialect.  When  I  read  this,  I  was 
vividly  reminded  of  the  identical  method  my  new  friends  applied 
to  me  when  at  the  age  of  ten  I  was  transplanted  from  Jutland 
to  a  school  in  Seeland  and  excited  their  merriment  through  some 
Jutlandish  expressions  and  intonations.  And  so  we  may  say  that 
the  most  important  factor  in  spreading  the  common  or  standard 
language  is  children  themselves. 

It  often  happens  that  children  who  are  compelled  at  home  to 
talk  without  any  admixture  of  dialect  talk  pure  dialect  when 
playing  with  their  schoolfellows  out  of  doors.     They  can  keep  the 

*  Hence,  also,  the  second  or  third  child  in  a  family  will,  as  a  rule,  learn 
to  speak  .more  rapidly  thtui  the  eldest. 


148  SOME  FUNDAMENTAL   PROBLEMS    [en.  viii 

two  forms  of  speech  distinct.  In  the  same  way  they  can  learn 
two  languages  less  closely  connected.  At  times  this  results  in 
very  strange  blcndings,  at  least  for  a  time  ;  but  many  children 
will  easily  pass  from  one  language  to  the  other  without  mixing 
them  up,  especially  if  they  come  in  contact  with  the  two  languages 
in  different  surroundings  or  on  the  lips  of  different  people. 

It  is,  of  course,  an  advantage  for  a  child  to  be  familiar  with 
two  languages  :  but  without  doubt  the  advantage  may  be,  and 
generally  is,  purchased  too  dear.  First  of  all  the  child  in  question 
hardl}'  learns  either  of  the  two  languages  as  perfectly  as  he  would 
have  done  if  he  had  limited  himself  to  one.  It  may  seem,  on  the 
surface,  as  if  he  talked  just  like  a  native,  but  he  does  not  really 
command  the  fine  points  of  the  language.  Has  any  bilingual  child 
ever  developed  into  a  great  artist  in  speech,  a  poet  or  orator  ? 

Secondly,  the  brain  effort  required  to  master  two  languages 
instead  of  one  certainly  diminishes  the  child's  power  of  learning 
other  things  which  might  and  ought  to  be  learnt.  Schuchardt 
rightly  remarks  that  if  a  bilingual  man  has  two  strings  to  his  bow, 
both  are  rather  slack,  and  that  the  three  souls  which  the  ancient 
Roman  said  he  possessed,  owing  to  his  being  able  to  talk  three 
different  languages,  were  probably  very  indifferent  souls  after  all. 
A  native  of  Luxemburg,  where  it  is  usual  for  children  to  talk 
both  French  and  German,  says  that  few  Luxemburgers  talk  both 
languages  perfectly.  "  Germans  often  say  to  us  :  '  You  speak 
German  remarkably  well  for  a  Frenchman,'  and  French  people 
will  say,  '  They  are  Germans  who  speak  our  language  excellently.' 
Nevertheless,  we  never  speak  either  language  as  fluently  as  the 
natives.  The  worst  of  the  system  is,  that  instead  of  learning 
things  necessary  to  us  we  must  spend  our  time  and  energy  in 
learning  to  express  the  same  thought  in  two  or  three  languages 
at  the  same  time."  ^ 


VIII.— §4.  Playing  at  Language. 

The  child  takes  delight  in  making  meaningless  sounds  long 
after  it  has  learnt  to  talk  the  language  of  its  elders.  At  2 . 2  Frans 
amused  himself  with  long  series  of  such  sounds,  uttered  with  the 
most  confiding  look  and  proper  intonation,  and  it  was  a  joy  to 
him  when  I  replied  with  similar  sounds.  He  kept  up  this  game 
for  years.  Once  (4.11)  after  such  a  performance  he  asked  me: 
"  Is  that  English  ?  "— "  No."—"  Why  not  ?  "— "  Because  I  under- 
stand English,  but  I  do  not  understand  what  you  say."  An 
hour  later  he  came  back  and  asked  :  "  Father,  do  you  know  all 
languages  ?  " — "  No,  there  are  many  I  don't  know." — "  Do  you 
*  I  translate  this  from  Ido,  see  The  International  Language,  May  1912. 


§4]  PLAYING   AT   LANGUAGE  149 

know  German  ?  " — "  Yes."  (Frans  looked  rather  crestfallen  : 
the  servants  had  often  said  of  his  invented  language  that  he 
was  talking  German.  So  he  went  on)  "  Do  you  know 
Japanese?" — "No." — (Delighted)  "So  remember  when  I  say 
something  you  don't  understand,  it's  Japanese." 

It  is  the  same  everywhere.  Hawthorne  writes  :  "  Pearl  mumbled 
something  into  his  ear,  that  sounded,  indeed,  like  human  language, 
but  was  only  such  gibberish  as  children  ni'^y  be  heard  amusing 
themselves  with,  by  the  hour  together  "  {The  Scarlet  Letter,  173). 
And  R.  L.  Stevenson  :  "  Children  prefer  the  shadow  to  the  substance. 
When  they  might  be  speaking  intelligibly  together,  they  chatter 
senseless  gibberish  by  the  hour,  and  are  quite  happy  because  they 
are  making  believe  to  speak  French"  {Virginibus  P.,  236;  cf. 
Glenconner,  p.  40;  Stern,  pp.  76,  91,  103).  Meringer's  boy  (2.1) 
took  the  music-book  and  sang  a  tune  of  his  own  making  with 
incomprehensible  words. 

Children  also  take  delight  in  varying  the  sounds  of  real  words, 
introducing,  for  instance,  alliterations,  as  "  Sing  a  song  of  sixpence, 
A  socket  full  of  sj^e,"  etc,  Frans  at  2 . 3  amused  himself  by  rounding 
all  his  vowels  (o  for  a,  y  for  i),  and  at  3.1  by  making  all  words  of 
a  verse  line  he  had  learnt  begin  with  d,  then  the  same  words  begin 
with  t.  O'Shea  (p.  32)  says  that  "  most  children  find  pleasure 
in  the  production  of  variations  upon  some  of  their  familiar  words. 
Their  purpose  seems  to  be  to  test  their  ability  to  be  original.  The 
performance  of  an  unusual  act  affords  pleasure  in  linguistics  as  in 
other  matters.  H.,  learning  the  word  dessert,  to  illustrate,  plays 
with  it  for  a  time  and  exhibits  it  in  a  dozen  or  more  variations — 
dissert,  dishert,  desot,  des^sert,  and  so  on." 

Rhythm  and  rime  appeal  strongly  to  the  children's  minds. 
One  English  observer  says  that  "  a  child  in  its  thii'd  year  will 
copy  the  rhythm  of  songs  and  verses  it  has  heard  in  nonsense 
words."  The  same  thing  is  noted  by  Meringer  (p.  116)  and 
Stern  (p.  103).  Tony  E.  (2.10)  suddenly  made  up  the  rime 
"  My  mover,  I  lov-er,"  and  Gordon  M.  (2 . 6)  never  tired  of  repeating 
a  phrase  of  his  own  composition,  "  Custard  over  mustard."  A 
Danish  girl  of  3.1  is  reported  as  having  a  "curious  knack  of 
twisting  all  words  into  rimes :  bestemor  hestemor  prestemor, 
Gudrun  sludriin  pludrun,  etc." 

Vin.— §  5.  Secret  Languages. 

Children,  as  we  have  seen,  at  first  employ  play-language  for 
its  own  sake,  with  no  arriere-pensee,  but  as  they  get  older  they 
may  see  that  such  language  has  the  advantage  of  not  being  under- 
stood by  their  elders,  and  so  they  may  develop  a  '  secret  language  ' 


150  SOME   FUNDAMENTAL   PROBLEMS    [ch.  viii 

consciously.  Some  such  languages  are  confined  to  one  school, 
others  may  be  in  common  use  among  children  of  a  certain  age 
all  over  a  country.  '  M-gibberish  '  and  '  S-gibberish  '  consist 
in  inserting  m  and  s,  as  in  goming  mout  tomdaym  or  gosings  outs 
tosdays  for  '  going  out  to-day  '  ;  '  Marrowskying  '  or  '  Hospital 
Greek  '  transfers  the  initial  letters  of  words,  as  renty  oj  plain  for 
'  plenty  of  rain,'  flutterby  for  '  butterfly ' ;  '  Ziph  '  or  '  Hypernese ' 
(at  Winchester)  substitutes  wa  for  the  first  of  two  initial  consonants 
and  inserts  p  or  g,  making  '  breeches  '  into  wareexhepes  and  '  penny  ' 
into  jjegennepy.  From  my  own  boyhood  in  Denmark  I  remember 
two  languages  of  this  sort,  in  which  a  sentence  like  '  du  er  et  lille 
asen  '  became  dupii  erper  efpet  lil2nllepe  apasenpen  and  durbe  erbe 
erbe  lirbelerbe  arbeserbe  respectively.  Closely  corresponding  lan- 
guages, with  insertion  of  p  and  addition  of  -erbse,  are  found  in 
Germany  ;  in  Holland  we  find  '  de  schoone  Mei '  made  into  depe 
schoopoonepe  Meipei,  besides  an  -erwi-iaal  with  a  variation  in 
which  the  ending  is  -erf.  In  France  such  a  language  is  called 
javanais  ;  '  je  vais  bien  '  is  made  into  je-de-que  vais-dai-qai  bien- 
den-qen.  In  Savoy  the  cowherds  put  deg  after  each  syllable  and 
thus  make  '  a-te  kogneu  se  va9hi '  ('  as-tu  connu  ce  vacher  1  '  in 
the  local  dialect)  into  a-degd  te-dege  ko-dego  gnu-deg^i  se-dege  va-dega 
chi-degi  ?  Nay,  even  among  the  Maoris  of  New  Zealand  there 
is  a  similar  secret  language,  in  which  instead  of  '  kei  te,  haere  au 
ki  reira  '  is  said  te-kei  te-i-te  te-haere-te-re  te-a  te-u  te-ki  te-re-te-i-te-ra. 
Human  nature  is  pretty  much  the  same  everywhere.^ 


Vm. — §  6.  Onomatopoeia. 

Do  children  really  create  new  words  ?  This  question  has  been 
much  discussed,  but  even  those  who  are  most  skeptical  in  that 
respect  incline  to  allow  them  this  power  in  the  case  of  words  which 
imitate  sounds.  Nevertheless,  it  should  be  remembered  that  the 
majority  of  onomatopoeic  words  heard  from  children  are  not  their 
own  invention,  but  are  acquired  by  them  in  the  same  way  as 
other  words.  Hence  it  is  that  such  words  have  different  forms 
in  different  languages.  Thus  to  English  cockadoodledoo  corresponds 
French  coquerico,  German  kikeriki  and  Danish  kykeliky,  to  E. 
quack-quack,  F.  cancan,  Dan.  raprap,  etc.  These  words  are  an 
imperfect  representation  of  the  birds'  natural  cry,  but  from  their 
likeness  to  it  they  are  easier  for  the  child  to  seize  than  an  entirely 
arbitrary  name  such  as  duck. 

But,  side  by  side  with  these,  children  do  invent  forms  of  their 
own,  though  the  latter  generally  disappear  quickly  in  favour  of  the 

^  I  have  collected  a  bibliographical  list  of  such  '  secret  languages  '  in 
Nord.  Tidaskrijt  J.  Filologi,  4r.  vol.  5. 


§  6]  ONOMATOPCEIA  151 

traditional  forms.  Thus  Frans  (2.3)  had  coined  the  word  vakvak, 
which  his  mother  liad  heard  sometimes  without  understanding  what 
he  meant,  when  one  day  he  pointed  at  some  crows  while  repeating 
the  same  word  ;  but  when  his  mother  told  him  that  these  birds 
were  called  krager,  he  took  hold  of  this  word  with  eagerness  and 
repeated  it  several  times,  evidently  recognizing  it  as  a  better  name 
than  his  own.  A  little  boy  of  2 . 1  called  soda-water  ft,  another  boy 
8aid  ging  or  gingging  for  a  clock,  also  for  the  railway  train,  while 
his  brother  said  dann  for  a  bell  or  clock;  a  little  girl  (1.9)  said 
2)ooh  (whispered)  for  '  match,  cigar,  pipe,'  and  gagag  for  '  hen,'  etc. 
When  once  formed,  such  words  may  be  transferred  to  other 
things,  where  the  sound  plays  no  longer  any  role.  This  may  be 
illustrated  through  two  extensions  of  the  same  word  buom  or  bom, 
used  by  two  children  first  to  express  the  sound  of  something  falling 
on  the  floor  ;  then  Ellen  K.  (1.9)  used  it  for  a  '  blow,'  and  finally 
for  anything  disagreeable,  e.g.  soap  in  the  eyes,  while  Kaare  G.  (1 . 8), 
after  seeing  a  plate  smashed,  used  the  word  for  a  broken  plate  and 
afterwards  for  anything  broken,  a  hole  in  a  dress,  etc.,  also  when  a 
button  had  come  off  or  when  anything  else  was  defective  in  any  way. 

Vin.— §7.  Word-inventions. 

Do  children  themselves  create  words — apart  from  onomatopoeic 
words  ?  To  me  there  is  no  doubt  that  they  do.  Frans  invented 
many  words  at  his  games  that  had  no  connexion,  or  very  little 
connexion,  with  existing  words.  He  was  playing  with  a  little 
twig  when  I  suddenly  heard  him  exclaim  :  "  This  is  called  lampe- 
tine"  but  a  little  while  afterwards  he  said  lanketine,  and  then 
again  lampetine,  and  then  he  said,  varying  the  play,  "  Now  it  is 
kluatine  and  traniklualalilua "  (3.6).  A  month  later  I  write: 
'■  He  is  never  at  a  loss  for  a  self-invented  word  ;  for  instance,  when 
he  has  made  a  figure  with  his  bricks  which  resembles  nothing 
whatever,  he  will  say,  '  That  shall  be  lindam.'  "  When  he  played 
at  trains  in  the  garden,  there  were  many  stations  with  fanciful 
names,  and  at  one  time  he  and  two  cousins  had  a  word  kukukounen 
which  they  repeated  constantly  and  thought  great  fun,  but  whose 
inner  meaning  I  never  succeeded  in  discovering.  An  English 
friend  writes  about  his  daughter  :  "  When  she  was  about  two 
and  a  quarter  she  would  often  use  some  nonsense  word  in  the 
middle  of  a  perfectly  intelligible  sentence.  When  you  asked  her 
its  meaning  she  would  explain  it  by  another  equally  unintelli- 
gible, and  so  on  through  a  series  as  long  as  you  cared  to  make 
it."  At  2.10  she  pretended  she  had  lost  her  bricks,  and  when 
you  showed  her  that  they  were  just  by  her,  she  insisted  that 
th'ey  were  not  '  bricks  '  at  all,  but  mtims. 


152  SOME   FUNDAMENTAL   PROBLEMS    [ch.  viii 

In  all  accounts  of  children's  talk  you  find  words  which  cannot 
be  referred  back  to  the  normal  language,  but  which  have  cropped 
up  from  some  unsounded  depth  of  the  child's  soul.  I  give  a  few 
from  notes  sent  to  me  by  Danish  friends  :  goi  '  comb,'  putput 
'  stocking,  or  any  other  piece  of  garment,'  i-a-a  '  chocolate,' 
gon  '  water  to  drink,  milk  '  (kept  apart  from  the  usual  word  vavd 
for  water,  which  she  used  only  for  water  to  wash  in),  hesh  '  news- 
paper, book.'  Some  such  words  have  become  famous  in  psycho- 
logical literature  because  they  were  observed  by  Darwin  and 
Taine.  Among  less  famous  instances  from  other  books  I  may 
mention  tibu  '  bird  '  (Striimpel),  adi  '  cake  '  (Ament),  be'lum-be'lum 
'  toy  with  two  men  turning  about,'  wakaJca  '  soldier,'  nda  '  jar,' 
pamma  '  pencil,'  bium  '  stocking  '  (Meringer). 

An  American  correspondent  writes  that  his  boy  was  fond  of 
pushing  a  stick  over  the  carpet  after  the  manner  of  a  carpet- 
sweeper  and  called  the  operation  jazing.  He  coined  the  word 
borkens  as  a  name  for  a  particular  sort  of  blocks  with  which  he 
was  accustomed  to  play.  He  was  a  nervous  child  and  his  imagina- 
tion created  objects  of  terror  that  haunted  him  in  the  dark,  and  to 
these  he  gave  the  name  of  Boons.  This  name  may,  however,  be 
derived  from  baboons.  Mr.  Harold  Palmer  tells  me  that  his 
daughter  (whose  native  language  was  French)  at  an  early  age 
used  ['fu'we]  for  '  soap  '  and  [de'det/]  for  '  horse,  wooden  horse, 
merry -go  -round . ' 

Dr.  F,  Poulsen,  in  his  book  Bejser  og  rids  (Copenhagen,  1920), 
says  about  his  two-year-old  daughter  that  when  she  gets  hold 
of  her  mother's  fur-collar  she  will  pet  it  and  lavish  on  it  all  kinds 
of  tender  self -invented  names,  such  as  apu  or  a-fo-me-me.  The  latter 
word,  "  which  has  all  the  melodious  euphony  and  vague  signification 
of  primitive  language,"  is  applied  to  anything  that  is  rare  and 
funny  and  worth  rejoicing  at.  On  a  summer  day's  excursion  there 
was  one  new  a-fo-me-me  after  the  other. 

In  spite  of  all  this,  a  point  on  which  all  the  most  distinguished 
investigators  of  children's  language  of  late  years  are  agreed  is 
that  children  never  invent  words.  Wundt  goes  so  far  as  to  say 
that  "  the  child's  language  is  the  result  of  the  child's  environment, 
the  child  being  essentially  a  passive  instrument  in  the  matter  " 
(S  1.  196) — one  of  the  most  wTong-headed  sentences  I  have  ever 
read  in  the  works  of  a  great  scientist.  Meumann  says  :  "  Preyer 
and  after  him  almost  every  careful  observer  among  child-psycholo- 
gists have  strongly  held  the  view  that  it  is  impossible  to  speak 
of  a  child  inventing  a  word."  Similarly  Meringer,  L  220,  Stern, 
126,  273,  337  ff.,  Bloomfield,  SL  12. 

These  investigators  seem  to  have  been  led  astray  by  expressions 
such   as   '  shape  out   of   nothing,'    '  invent,'   '  original   creation ' 


§  7]  WORD-INVENTIONS  153 

(UrschCpfung),  and  to  have  taken  this  doctrinaire  attitude  in 
partial  defiance  of  the  facts  they  have  themselves  advanced. 
Expressions  like  those  adduced  occur  over  and  over  again  in  their 
discussions,  and  Meumann  says  openly  :  "  Invention  demands  a 
methodical  proceeding  with  intention,  a  conception  of  an  end  to 
be  realized."  Of  course,  if  that  is  necessary  it  is  clear  that  we 
can  speak  of  invention  of  words  in  the  case  of  a  chemist  seeking 
a  word  for  a  new  substance,  and  not  in  the  case  of  a  tiny  child. 
But  are  there  not  many  inventions  in  the  technical  world,  which 
we  do  not  hesitate  to  call  inventions,  which  have  come  about 
more  or  less  by  chance  ?  Wasn't  it  so  probably  with  gunpowder  ? 
According  to  the  story  it  certainly  was  so  with  blotting-paper  : 
the  foreman  who  had  forgotten  to  add  size  to  a  portion  of  writing- 
paper  was  dismissed,  but  the  manufacturer  who  saw  that  the  paper 
thus  spoilt  could  be  turned  to  account  instead  of  the  sand  hitherto 
used  made  a  fortune.  So  according  to  Meumann  blotting-paper 
has  never  been  '  invented.'  If  in  order  to  acknowledge  a  child's 
creation  of  a  word  we  are  to  postulate  that  it  has  been  produced 
out  of  nothing,  what  about  bicycles,  fountain-j)ens,  type\vriters — 
each  of  which  was  something  existing  before,  carried  just  a  little 
further  ?  Ai'e  they  on  that  account  not  inventions  ?  One  would 
think  not,  when  one  reads  these  ^v^iters  on  children's  language, 
for  as  soon  as  the  least  approximation  to  a  word  in  the  normal 
language  is  discovered,  the  child  is  denied  both  '  invention  '  and 
'  the  speech-forming  faculty  '  !  Thus  Stern  (p.  338)  says  that 
his  daughter  in  her  second  year  used  some  words  which  might 
be  taken  as  proof  of  the  power  to  create  words,  but  for  the  fact 
that  it  was  here  possible  to  show  how  these  '  new  '  words  had  grown 
out  of  normal  words.  Eisckei,  for  instance,  was  used  as  a  verb 
meaning  '  go,  walk,'  but  it  originated  in  the  words  eins,  zwei  (one, 
two)  which  were  said  when  the  child  Avas  taught  to  walk.  Other 
examples  are  given  comparable  to  those  mentioned  above  (106,  115) 
as  mutilations  of  the  first  period.  Now,  even  if  all  those  words 
given  by  myself  and  others  as  original  inventions  of  children 
could  be  proved  to  be  similar  perversions  of  '  real '  words  (which 
is  not  likely),  I  should  not  hesitate  to  speak  of  a  word-creating 
faculty,  for  eischei,  '  to  walk,'  is  both  in  form  and  still  more  in 
meaning  far  enough  from  eins,  zwei  to  be  reckoned  a  totally 
new  word. 

We  can  divide  words  '  invented  '  by  children  into  three  classes  : 

A.  The  child  gives  both  sound  and  meaning. 

B.  The  gro\\Ti-up  people  give  the  sound,  and  the  child  the 

meaning. 

C.  The  child  gives  the  sound,  grown-up  people  the  meaning. 


15  i  SOME   FUNDAMENTAL   PROBLEMS    [cii.  viii 

But  the  three  classes  cannot  always  be  kept  apart,  especially 
when  the  child  imitates  the  grown-up  person's  sound  so  badly  or 
seizes  the  meaning  so  imperfectly  that  very  little  is  left  of  what 
the  grown-up  person  gives.  As  a  rule,  the  self-created  words 
will  be  very  short-lived  ;  still,  there  are  exceptions. 

O'Shea's  account  of  one  of  these  words  is  very  instructive. 
"  She  had  also  a  few  words  of  her  own  coining  which  were  attached 
spontaneously  to  objects,  and  these  her  elders  took  up,  and  they 
became  fixed  in  her  vocabulary  for  a  considerable  period.  A  word 
resembling  Ndobbin  was  employed  for  every  sort  of  thing  which 
she  used  for  food.  The  word  came  originally  from  an  accidental 
combination  of  sounds  made  while  she  was  eating.  By  the  aid 
of  the  people  about  her  in  responding  to  this  term  and  repeating 
it,  she  '  selected  '  it  and  for  a  time  used  it  purpose fulh^  She 
employed  it  at  the  outset  for  a  specific  article  of  food  ;  then  her 
elders  extended  it  to  other  articles,  and  this  aided  her  in  making 
the  extension  herself.  Once  started  in  this  process,  she  extended 
the  term  to  many  objects  associated  with  her  food,  even  objects 
as  remote  from  her  original  experience  as  dining-room,  high-chair, 
kitchen,  and  even  apple  and  plum  trees  "  (O'Shea,  27). 

To  Class  A  I  assign  most  of  the  words  already  given  as  the 
child's  creations,  whether  the  child  be  great  or  small. 

Class  B  is  that  which  is  most  sparsely  represented.  A  child 
in  Finland  often  heard  the  well-knoTvn  line  about  King  Karl 
(Charles  XII),  "  Han  stod  i  rok  och  damm  "  ("  He  stood  in  smoke 
and  dust "),  and  taldng  ro  to  be  the  adjective  meaning '  red,'  imagined 
the  remaining  syllables,  which  he  heard  as  Tcordamm,  to  be  the 
name  of  some  piece  of  garment.  This  amused  his  parents  so  much 
that  kordamm  became  the  name  of  a  dressing-gowTi  in  that  family. 

To  Class  C,  where  the  child  contributes  only  the  sound  and 
the  older  people  give  a  meaning  to  what  on  the  child's  side  was 
meaningless — a  process  that  reminds  one  of  the  invention  of 
blotting-paper — belong  some  of  the  best-known  words,  which 
require  a  separate  section. 

Vni.— §8.  'Mamma'  and  'Papa.' 

In  the  nurseries  of  all  countries  a  little  comedy  has  in  all  ages 
been  played — the  baby  lies  and  babbles  his  '  mamama '  or 
'  amama  '  or  '  papapa  '  or  *  apapa  '  or  '  bababa  '  or  '  ababab  ' 
without  associating  the  slightest  meaning  with  liis  mouth-games, 
and  his  grown-up  friends,  in  their  joy  over  the  precocious  child, 
assign  to  these  syllables  a  rational  sense,  accustomed  as  thej'  are 
themselves  to  the  fact  of  an  uttered  sound  having  a  content,  a 
thought,  an  idea,  corresponding  to  it.     So  we  get  a  whole  class 


§8]  *MAM1\IA'    AND    'PAPA'  155 

of  words,  distinguished  by  a  simplicity  of  sound-formation — never 
two  consonants  together,  generally  the  same  consonant  repeated 
with  an  a  between,  frequently  also  with  an  a  at  the  end — words 
found  in  many  languages,  often  in  different  forms,  but  with 
essentially  the  same  meaning. 

First  we  have  words  for  '  mother.'  It  is  very  natural  that 
the  mother  who  is  greeted  by  her  happy  child  with  the  sound 
'  mama  '  should  take  it  as  though  the  child  were  calling  her  '  mama,' 
and  since  she  frequently  comes  to  the  cradle  when  she  hears  the 
sound,  the  child  himself  does  learn  to  use  these  syllables  when 
he  wants  to  call  her.  In  this  way  they  become  a  recognized  word 
for  the  idea  '  mother  ' — now  with  the  stress  on  the  first  syllable, 
now  on  the  second.  In  French  we  get  a  nasal  vowel  either  in 
the  last  syllable  only  or  in  both  syllables.  At  times  we  have  only 
one  syllable,  ma.  When  once  these  syllables  have  become  a  regular 
word  they  follow  the  speech  laws  which  govern  other  words  ;  thus 
among  other  forms  we  get  the  German  muhme,  the  meaning  of  which 
('  aunt ')  is  explained  as  in  the  words  mentioned,  p.  118.  In  very  early 
times  ma  in  our  group  of  languages  was  supplied  with  a  termination, 
so  that  we  get  the  form  underlying  Greek  meter,  Lat.  mater  (whence 
Fr.  mere,  etc.),  our  own  mother,  G.  mutter,  etc.  These  words 
became  the  recognized  grown-up  words,  while  mama  itself  was 
only  used  in  the  intimacy  of  the  family.  It  depends  on  fashion, 
however,  how  '  high  up  '  mama  can  be  used  :  in  some  countries 
and  in  some  periods  children  are  allowed  to  use  it  longer  than 
in  others. 

The  forms  mama  and  ma  are  not  the  only  ones  for  '  mother.' 
The  child's  am  has  also  been  seized  and  maintained  by  the  grown- 
ups. The  Albanian  word  for  '  mother  '  is  ama,  the  Old  Norse 
M'ord  for  '  grandmother  '  is  amma.  The  Latin  am-ita,  formed  from 
am  with  a  termination  added,  came  to  mean  '  aunt '  and  became 
in  OFr,  ante,  whence  E.  aunt  and  Modern  Fr.  iante.  In  Semitic 
languages  the  words  for  '  mother  '  also  have  a  vowel  before  m  : 
Assyrian  ummu,  Hebrew  '^m,  etc. 

Baba,  too,  is  found  in  the  sense  '  mother,'  especially  in  Slavonic 
languages,  though  it  has  here  developed  various  derivative  mean- 
ings, 'old  woman,'  'grandmother,'  or  'midwife.'  In  Tonga  we 
have  hama  '  mother.' 

Forms  with  n  are  also  found  for  '  mother  ' ;  so  Sanskrit  nana, 
Albanian  nane.  Here  we  have  also  Gr.  nanne  '  aunt '  and  Lat. 
nonna ;  the  latter  ceased  in  the  early  Middle  Ages  to  mean  '  grand- 
mother '  and  became  a  respectful  way  of  addressing  women  of  a 
certain  age,  whence  we  know  it  as  nun,  the  feminine  counterpart 
of  '  monk.'  From  less  known  languages  I  may  mention  Green- 
landic  a\na-na  'mother,'  ^ana  'grandmother.' 


156  SOME  FUNDAMENTAL  PROBLEMS    [ch.  viii 

Now  we  come  to  words  meaning  '  father,'  and  quite  natm-allj', 
where  tlic  sound-groups  containmg  m  have  already  been  inter- 
preted in  the  sense  '  mother,'  a  word  for  '  father  '  will  be  sought 
in  the  syllables  with  -p.  It  is  no  doubt  frequently  noticed  in  the 
nursery  that  the  bab}^  says  mama  where  one  expected  papa,  and 
vice  versa  ;  but  at  last  he  learns  to  deal  out  the  syllables  '  rightly,' 
as  we  say.  The  history  of  the  forms  papa,  pappa  and  pa  is  analo- 
gous to  the  history  of  the  m  syllables  already  traced.  We  have 
the  same  extension  of  the  sound  by  tr  in  the  word  pater,  which 
according  to  recognized  laws  of  sound-change  is  found  in  the 
French  pere,  the  English  father,  the  Danish  fader,  the  German 
vaier,  etc.  Philologists  no  longer,  fortunately^  derive  these  words 
from  a  root  pa  '  to  protect,'  and  see  therein  a  proof  of  the  '  highly 
moral  spirit '  of  our  aboriginal  ancestors,  as  Fick  and  others  did. 
Papa,  as  we  Imow,  also  became  an  honourable  title  for  a  reverend 
ecclesiastic,  and  hence  comes  the  name  which  we  have  in  the 
form  Pope. 

Side  by  side  with  the  p  forms  we  have  forms  in  b — Italian 
babbo,  Bulgarian  babd,  Serbian  bdba,  Turkish  baba.  Beginning 
with  the  vowel  we  have  the  Semitic  forms  ab,  abu  and  finally  abba, 
which  is  well  known,  since  through  Greek  abbas  it  has  become  the 
name  for  a  spiritual  father  in  all  European  languages,  our  form 
being  Abbot. 

Again,  we  have  some  names  for  '  father  '  with  dental  soimds  : 
Sanskrit  lata,  Russian  lata,  tyatya,  Welsh  tat,  etc.  The  English 
dad,  now  so  miiversal,  is  sometimes  considered  to  have  been  bor- 
rowed from  this  Welsh  Avord,  which  in  certain  connexions  has  an 
initial  d,  but  no  doubt  it  had  an  independent  origin.  In  Slavonic 
languages  ded  is  extensively  used  for  '  grandfather  '  or  '  old  man.' 
Thus  also  deite,  teite  in  German  dialects.  Tata  '  father  '  is  found 
in  Congo  and  other  African  languages,  also  {tatta)  in  Negro- 
English  (Surinam).  And  just  as  words  for  '  mother  '  change  their 
meaning  from  '  mother  '  to  '  aunt,'  so  these  forms  in  some  lan- 
guages come  to  mean  '  uncle  '  :  Gr.  theios  (whence  Italian  zio), 
Lithuanian  dede,  Russian  dyadya. 

With  an  initial  vowel  we  get  the  form  atta,  in  Greek  used  in 
addressing  old  people,  in  Gothic  the  ordinary  word  for  '  father,' 
which  with  a  termination  added  gives  the  proper  name  Attila, 
originally  '  little  father  '  ;  with  another  ending  we  have  Russian 
otec.  Outside  our  own  family  of  languages  we  find,  for  instance, 
Magyar  atya,  Turkish  ata,  Basque  aita,  Greenlandic  a'ta-ta  '  father,' 
while  in  the  last-mentioned  language  a-ta  means  '  grandfather.'  ^ 

^  I  subjoin  a  few  additional  examples.  Basque  aita  '  father,'  ama 
'  mother,'  anaya  '  brother '  {Zeitsch.  f.  rom.  Phil.  17,  146).  Manchu  a77ia 
'  father,'  ewe  '  mother  '  (the  vowel  relation  aa  in  haha  '  man,'  hehe  '  woman,' 


§8]  'MAMMA'    AND    'PAPA'  157 

The  nurse,  too,  comes  in  for  her  share  in  these  names,  as  she 
too  is  greeted  by  the  child's  babbling  and  is  tempted  to  take  it 
as  the  child's  name  for  her  ;  thus  we  get  the  German  and  Scandi- 
navian amme,  Polish  niania,  Russian  nyanya,  cf.  our  Nanny. 
These  words  cannot  be  kept  distinct  from  names  for  '  aunt,'  cf. 
amita  above,  and  in  Sanskrit  we  find  mama  for  '  uncle.' 

It  is  perhaps  more  doubtful  if  we  can  find  a  name  for  the 
child  itself  which  has  arisen  in  the  same  way  ;  the  nearest  example 
is  the  Engl,  babe,  baby,  German  bube  (with  u  as  in  mnhme  above)  ; 
but  babe  has  also  been  explained  as  a  word  derived  normally  from 
OFr.  bavbe,  from  Lat.  balbvs  '  stammering.'  When  the  name 
Bab  or  Babs  (Babbe  in  a  Danish  famil}')  becomes  the  pet-name 
for  a  little  girl,  this  has  no  doubt  come  from  an  interpretation 
put  on  her  own  meaningless  sounds.  Ital.  bambo  {bambino)  cer- 
tainly belongs  here.  We  may  here  mention  also  some  terms  for 
'  doll,'  Lat.  'pupa  or  puppa,  G.  puppe  ;  with  a  derivative  ending 
we  have  Fr.  poupee,  E.  pupjjet  (Chaucer,  A  3254,  popelote).  These 
words  have  a  rich  semantic  development,  cf.  jjw^a  (Dan.  pnppe, 
etc.)  '  chrysalis,'  and  the  diminutive  Lat.  pt'^'V'i^^vs,  pupilla,  which 
was  used  for  '  a  little  child,  minor,'  whence  E.  pt(pil  '  disciple,' 
but  also  for  the  little  child  seen  in  the  eye,  whence  E.  (and  other 
languages)  pupil,  '  central  opening  of  the  eye.' 

A  child  has  another  main  interest — that  is,  in  its  food,  the 
breast,  the  bottle,  etc.  In  many  countries  it  has  been  observed 
that  very  early  a  child  uses  a  long  m  (without  a  vowel)  as  a  sign 
that  it  wants  something,  but  we  can  hardly  be  right  in  supposing 
that  the  sound  is  originallj''  meant  by  children  in  this  sense.  They 
do  not  use  it  consciously  till  they  see  that  gro'mi-up  people  on 
hearing  the  sound  come  up  and  find  out  what  the  child  wants. 
And  it  is  the  same  with  the  developed  forms  which  are  uttered 
by  the  child  in  its  joy  at  getting  something  to  eat,  and  which  are 
therefore  interpreted  as  the  child's  expression  for  food  :  am,  mam, 
mammam,  or  the  same  words  with  a  final  a — that  is,  really  the  same 
groups  of  sounds  which  came  to  stand  for  '  mother.'  The  deter- 
mination of  a  particular  form  to  a  particular  meaning  is  always 
due  to  the  adults,  who,  however,  can  subsequently  teach  it  to  the 
child.  Under  this  heading  comes  the  sound  ham,  which  Taine 
observed  to  be  one  child's  expression  for  hunger  or  thirst  (h  mute  ?), 
and  similarly  the  word  mum,  meaning  '  something  to  eat,'  invented, 

Gabelentz,  S  389).  Kutenai  pw  '  brother's  daughter,'  papa  '  grandmother 
(said  by  male),  grandfather,  grandson,'  pat\  'nephew,'  ma  'mother,'  nana 
'  younger  sister' (of  girl),  aZnaria  '  sisters,'  tite  'mother-in-law,'  titu  'father' 
(of  male) — (Boas,  Kutenai  Tales,  Bureau  of  Am.  Ethnol.  59,  1918).  Cf, 
also  Sapir,  "Kinship  Terms  of  the  Kootenay  Indians  "  {Amer.  Anthropologist, 
vol.  20).  In  the  same  writer's  Yana  Terms  oj  Relationship  (Univ.  of  Cali- 
fornia,  1918)  there  seems  to  be  very  little  from  this  source. 


158  SOME  FUNDAMENTAL  PROBLEMS     [ch.  viii 

as  we  are  told,  by  Darwin's  son  and  often  uttered  with  a  rising 
intonation,  as  in  a  question,  '  Will  you  give  me  something  to  eat  ? ' 
Lindner's  child  (1.5)  is  said  to  have  used  papj)  for  everything 
eatable  and  mem  or  mom  for  anything  drinkable.  In  normal 
language  we  have  forms  like  Sanslmt  mdmsa  (Gothic  mimz)  and 
mas  "  flesh,'  our  own  meat  (which  formerly,  like  Dan.  mad,  meant 
any  kind  of  food),  German  mus  '  jam  '  (whence  also  gemiise),  and 
finally  Lat.  mandere  and  mandurare  '  to  chew  '  (whence  Fr.  manger) 
— all  developments  of  this  childish  ma{m.). 

As  the  child's  first  nourishment  is  its  mother's  breast,  its  joyous 
mamama  can  also  be  taken  to  mean  the  breast.  So  we  have  the 
Latin  mamma  (with  a  diminutive  ending  mammilla,  whence 
Fr.  mamelle),  and  with  the  other  labial  sound  Engl,  pap,  Nor- 
wegian and  Swed.  dial,  pappe,  Lat.  papilla;  with  a  different  vowel, 
It.  poppa,  Fr.  poupe,  '  teat  of  an  animal,  formerly  also  of  a  woman ' ; 
with  b,  G.  biibbi,  obsolete  E.  bubby ;  with  a  dental,  E.  teat  (G.  zitze), 
Ital.  tetta,  Dan.  titte,  Swed.  dial,  tatte.  Further  we  have  words 
like  E.  pa]}  '  soft  food,'  Latin  papare  '  to  eat,'  orig.  '  to  suck,' 
and  some  G.  forms  for  the  same,  pappen,  pampen,  pampfen. 
Perhaps  the  beginning  of  the  word  milk  goes  back  to  the  baby's 
m,a  applied  to  the  mother's  breast  or  milk  ;  the  latter  half  may 
then  be  connected  with  Lat.  lac.  In  Greenlandic  we  have  amama 
'  suckle.' 

Inseparable  from  these  words  is  the  sound,  a  long  m  or  am, 
which  expresses  the  child's  delight  over  something  that  tastes 
good  ;  it  has  by-forms  in  the  Scotch  nyam  or  nyamnyam,  the  English 
seaman's  term  yam  '  to  eat,'  and  with  two  dentals  the  French 
nanan  '  sweetmeats.'  Some  linguists  will  have  it  that  the  I^atin 
amo  '  I  love  '  is  derived  from  this  am,  which  expresses  pleasurable 
satisfaction.  When  a  father  tells  me  that  his  son  (1.10)  vjses 
the  wonderful  words  nanana^i  for  '  chocolate  '  and  jajajaja  for 
picture-book,  we  have  no  doubt  here  also  a  case  of  a  grown 
person's  interpretation  of  the  originally  meaningless  sounds  of 
a  child. 

Another  meaning  that  grown-up  people  may  attach  to  syllables 
uttered  by  the  child  is  that  of  '  good-bye,'  as  in  English  tata,  which 
has  now  been  incorporated  in  the  ordinary  language.^  Stern 
probably  is  right  when  he  thinks  that  the  French  adieu  would 
not  have  been  accepted  so  commonly  in  Germany  and  other 
countries  if  it  had  not  accommodated  itself  so  easily,  esj^ecially 
in  the  form  commonly  used  in  German,  ade,  to  the  chiild's  natural 
word. 

*  Tata  18  also  used  for  '  a  walk  '  (to  go  out  for  a  ta-ta,  or  to  go  out  ta-tas) 
and  for  '  a  hat ' — meanings  that  may  very  well  have  developed  from  the 
child's  saying  these  syllables  when  going  out  or  preparing  to  go  out. 


§8]  'MAMMA'    AND    'PAPA'  159 

There  are  some  words  for  '  bed,  sleep  '  which  clearly  belong 
to  this  class:  Tuscan  nanna  'cradle,'  Sp.  hacer  la  nana  'go  to 
sleep,'  E.  bye-bye  (possibly  associated  with  good-bye,  instead  of 
which  is  also  said  byebye)  ;  Stern  mentions  baba  (Berlin),  beibei 
(Russian),  6060  (Malay),  but  bischbisch,  which  he  also  gives  here, 
is  evidently  (like  the  Danish  visse)  imitative  of  the  sound  used  for 
hushing. 

Words  of  this  class  stand  in  a  way  outside  the  common  words 
of  a  language,  owing  to  their  origin  and  their  being  continually 
new-created.  One  cannot  therefore  deduce  laws  of  sound-change 
from  them  in  their  original  shape  ;  and  it  is  equally  wrong  to  use 
them  as  evidence  for  an  original  kinship  between  different  families 
of  language  and  to  count  them  as  loan-words,  as  is  frequently 
done  (for  example,  when  the  Slavonic  baba  is  said  to  be  borrowed 
from  Turkish).  The  English  yapa  and  inam{m)a,  and  the  same 
words  in  German  and  Danish,  Italian,  etc.,  are  almost  always 
regarded  as  borrowed  from  French  ;  but  Cauer  rightly  points  out 
that  Nausikaa  {Odyssey  6.  57)  addresses  her  father  as  -pappa  fil, 
and  Homer  cannot  be  suspected  of  borrowing  fi'om  French.  Still, 
it  is  true  that  fashion  may  play  a  part  in  deciding  how  long  children 
may  be  permitted  to  say  papa  and  mamma,  and  a  French  fashion 
may  in  this  respect  have  spread  to  other  European  countries, 
especially  in  the  seventeenth  century.  We  may  not  find  these 
words  in  early  use  in  the  literatures  of  the  different  countries,  but 
this  is  no  proof  that  the  words  were  not  used  in  the  nursery.  As 
soon  as  a  word  of  this  class  has  somewhere  got  a  special  application, 
this  can  very  well  pass  as  a  loan-word  from  land  to  land — as  we 
saw  in  the  case  of  the  words  0660^  and  pope.  And  it  may  be 
granted  with  respect  to  the  primary  use  of  the  words  that  there 
are  certain  national  or  quasi-national  customs  which  determine 
what  grown  people  expect  to  hear  from  babies,  so  that  one  nation 
expects  and  recognizes  papa,  another  dad,  a  third  atta,  for  the 
meaning  'father.' 

When  the  child  hands  something  to  somebody  or  reaches  out 
for  something  he  will  generally  say  something,  and  if,  as  often 
happens,  this  is  ta  or  da,  it  will  be  taken  by  its  parents  and  others 
as  a  real  word,  different  according  to  the  language  they  speak ; 
in  England  as  there  or  thanks,  in  Denmark  as  tak  '  thanks '  ^  or 
tag  ■  take,'  in  Germany  as  da  '  there,'  in  France  as  tiens  '  hold,' 
in  Russia  as  day  '  give,'  in  Italy  as  to,  (=  togli)  '  take.'  The 
form  te  in  Homer  is  interpreted  by  some  as  an  imperative  of 
teino   'stretch.'     These  instances,  however,  are   slightly  different 

^  The  Swede  Bolin  says  that  his  child  said  tatt-tatt,  which  he  interprets 
as  tack,  even  when  handing  something  to  others. 


160  SOME  FUNDAMENTAL  PROBLEMS    [ch.  viii 

ill   character    from    those   discussed    in    the    main    part    of   this 
chapter.! 

*  The  views  advanced  in  §  8  have  some  points  in  contact  with  the  remarks 
found  in  Stern's  ch.  xix,  p.  300,  only  that  I  lay  more  stress  on  the  arbitrary 
interpretation  of  the  child's  meaningless  syllables  on  the  part  of  the  grown- 
ups, and  that  I  cannot  approve  his  theory  of  the  ni  syllables  as  '  centripetal  ' 
and  the  p  syllables  as  '  centrifugal  affective-volitional  natural  sounds.' 
Paul  (P  §  127)  says  that  the  nursery-language  with  its  bowwow,  papa,  mama, 
etc.,  "  is  not  the  invention  of  the  children  ;  it  is  handed  over  to  them  just 
as  any  other  language  "  ;  he  overlooks  the  share  children  have  themselves 
in  these  words,  or  in  some  of  them  ;  nor  are  they,  as  he  says,  formed  by 
tlie  grown-ups  with  a  purely  pedagogical  purpose.  Nor  can  I  find  that 
Wundt's  chapter  "  Angebliche  worterfindung  des  kindes "  (S  1.  273-287) 
contains  decisive  arguments.  Curtius  (K  88)  thinks  that  Gr,  pater  was 
first  shortened  into  pa  and  this  then  extended  into  pdppa — but  certainly 
it  is  rather  the  other  way  round. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE    INFLUENCE    OF    THE   CHILD    ON 
LINGUISTIC    DEVELOPMENT 

§  1.  Conflicting  Views.  §  2.  Meringer.  Analogy.  §  3.  Herzog's  Theory  of 
Sound  Changes.  §  4.  Gradual  Shiftings.  §  5.  Leaps.  §  0.  Assimila< 
tions,  etc.     §  7.  Stump-words. 

IX.— §  1.  Conflicting  Views. 

We  all  know  that  in  historical  times  languages  have  been  con- 
stantly changing,  and  we  have  much  indirect  evidence  that  in 
prehistoric  times  they  did  the  same  thing.  But  when  it  is 
asked  if  these  changes,  unavoidable  as  they  seem  to  be,  are  to  be 
ascribed  primarily  to  childi'en  and  their  defective  imitation  of 
the  speech  of  their  elders,  or  if  children's  language  in  general 
plays  no  part  at  all  in  the  history  of  language,  we  find  linguists 
expressing  quite  contrary  views,  without  the  question  having 
ever  been  really  thoroughly  investigated. 

Some  hold  that  the  child  acquires  its  language  with  such  per- 
fection that  it  cannot  be  held  responsible  for  the  changes  recorded 
in  the  historj'  of  languages  :  others,  on  the  contrary,  hold  that 
the  most  important  source  of  these  changes  is  to  be  found  in  the 
transmission  of  the  language  to  new  generations.  How  undecided 
the  attitude  even  of  the  foremost  linguists  may  be  towards  the 
question  is  perhaps  best  seen  in  the  views  expressed  at  different 
times  by  Sweet.  In  1882  he  reproaches  Paul  with  paying  attention 
only  to  the  shiftings  going  on  in  the  pronunciation  of  the  same 
individual,  and  not  acknowledging  "  the  much  more  potent  cause 
of  change  which  exists  in  the  fact  that  one  generation  can  learn 
the  sounds  of  the  preceding  one  by  imitation  only.  It  is  an  open 
question  whether  the  modifications  made  by  the  individual  in  a 
sound  he  has  once  learnt,  independently  of  imitation  of  those 
around  him,  are  not  too  infinitesimal  to  have  any  appreciable 
effect  "  (CP  153).  In  the  same  spirit  he  asserted  in  1899  that 
the  process  of  learning  our  own  language  in  childhood  is  a  very 
slow  one,  "  and  the  results  are  always  imperfect.  ...  If  languages 
were  learnt  perfectly  by  the  children  of  each  generation,  then 
languages  would  not  change  :  English  children  would  still  speak 
a  language  as  old  at  least  as  '  Anglo-Saxon,'  and  there  would  be 

11  161 


162  THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  CHILD       [ch.  ix 

no  such  languages  as  French  and  Italian.  The  changes  in  languages 
are  simjily  slight  mistakes,  -which  in  the  course  of  generations 
completely  alter  the  character  of  the  language  "  (PS  75).  But 
only  one  year  later,  in  1900,  he  maintains  that  the  child's  imitation 
"  is  in  most  cases  practically  perfect  " — "  the  main  cause  of 
sound-change  must  therefore  be  sought  elsewhere.  The  real 
cause  of  sound-change  seems  to  be  organic  shifting — failure  to  hit 
the  mark,  the  result  either  of  carelessness  or  sloth  ...  a  slight 
deviation  from  the  pronunciation  learnt  in  infancy  may  easily 
pass  unheeded,  especially  by  those  who  make  the  same  change 
in  their  own  pronunciation"  (H  19  f.).  By  the  term  "organic 
shifting  "  Sweet  evidently,  as  seen  from  his  preface,  meant  shifting 
in  the  pronunciation  of  the  adult,  thus  a  modification  of  the  sound 
learnt  '  perfectly  '  in  childhood.  Paul,  who  in  the  first  edition 
(1880)  of  his  Prhizijnen  ch)'  SjirachgescMchte  did  not  mention 
the  influence  of  children,  in  all  the  following  editions  (2nd,  1886, 
p.  58  ;  3rd,  1898,  p.  58  ;  4th,  1909,  p.  63)  expressly  says  that 
"  die  hauptveranlassung  zum  lautwandel  in  der  iibertragung  der 
laute  auf  neue  individuen  liegt,'"'  while  the  shiftings  within  the 
same  generation  are  very  slight.  Paul  thus  modified  his  view  in 
the  opposite  direction  of  Sweet  ^ — and  did  so  under  the  influence 
of  Sweet's  criticism  of  his  own  first  view  ! 

When  one  finds  scholars  expressing  themselves  in  this  manner 
and  giving  hardly  any  reasons  for  their  \'iews,  one  is  tempted  to 
believe  that  the  question  is  perhaps  insoluble,  that  it  is  a  mere 
toss-up,  or  that  in  the  sentence  "  children's  imitation  is  nearly 
perfect  "  the  stress  may  be  laid,  according  to  taste,  now  on  the  word 
nearly,  and  now  on  the  word  perfect.  I  am,  however,  convinced  that 
we  can  get  a  little  farther,  though  only  by  breaking  up  the  question, 
instead  of  treating  it  as  one  vague  and  indeterminate  whole. 

IX.— §2.  Meringer.    Analogy. 

Among  recent  writers  Meringer  has  gone  furthest  into  the 
question,  adhering  in  the  main  to  the  general  view  that,  just  as 
in  other  fields,  social,  economic,  etc.,  it  is  grown-up  men  who 
take  the  lead  in  new  developments,  so  it  is  grown-up  men,  and 
not  women  or  children,  Avho  carry  things  forAvard  in  the  field  of 

^  The  same  inconsistency  is  found  in  Dauzat,  who  in  1910  thought  that 
nothing,  and  in  1912  that  nearly  everything,  was  due  to  imperfect  imitation 
by  the  child  (V  22  £E.,  Ph  63,  cf.  3).  Wechssler  (L  p.  86)  quotes  passages 
from  Bremer,  Passy,  Rousselot  and  Wallensk6ld,  in  which  the  chief  cause 
of  soimd  changes  is  attributed  to  the  child  ;  to  these  niight  be  added  Storm 
(Phonetische  Studien,  5.  200)  and  A.  Thomson  (IF  24,  1909,  p.  9),  probably 
also  Crammont  {Mdl.  linguist.  61).  Many  writers  seem  to  imagine  that 
the  question  is  settled  when  they  are  able  to  adduce  a  certain  number  of 
parallel  changes  in  the  pronvmciation  cf  some  child  and  in  the  historical 
evolution  of  languages. 


§2]  MERINGER.     ANALOGY  103 

language.  In  one  place  he  justifies  his  standpoint  by  a  reference 
to  a  special  case,  and  I  will  take  this  as  the  starting-point  of  my 
own  consideration  of  the  question.  He  saj^s  :  "  It  can  be  shown 
by  various  examples  that  they  [changes  in  language]  are  decidedly 
not  due  to  children.  In  Ionic,  Attic  and  Lesbian  Greek  the 
words  for  'hundreds  '  are  formed  in  -kosioi  {diakosioi,  etc.),  while 
elsewhere  (in  Doric  and  Boeotian)  they  appear  as  -kdtioi.  How 
does  the  o  arise  in  -kosioi  ?  It  is  generally  said  that  it  comes 
from  0  in  the  '  tens  '  in  the  termination  -konta.  Can  it  be  children 
who  have  formed  the  words  for  hundreds  on  the  model  of  the 
words  for  tens,  children  under  six  years  old,  who  are  just  learning 
to  talk  ?  Such  children  generally  have  other  things  to  attend 
to  than  to  practise  themselves  in  numerals  above  a  hundred." 
Similar  formations  are  adduced  from  Latin,  and  it  is  stated  that 
the  personal  pronouns  are  especially  subject  to  change,  but  children 
do  not  use  the  jDcrsonal  pronouns  till  an  age  when  they  are  already 
in  firm  possession  of  the  language.  Meringer  then  draws  the 
conclusion  that  the  share  which  children  take  in  bringing  about 
linguistic  change  is  a  very  small  one. 

Now,  I  should  like  fii'st  to  remark  that  even  if  it  is  possible  to 
point  to  certain  changes  in  language  which  cannot  be  ascribed 
to  little  children,  this  proves  nothing  with  regard  to  the  very 
numerous  changes  which  lie  outside  these  limits.  And  next, 
that  all  the  cases  here  mentioned  are  examples  of  formation  by 
analogy.  But  from  the  very  nature  of  the  case,  the  conditions 
requisite  for  the  occurrence  of  such  formations  are  exactly  the 
same  in  the  case  of  adults  and  in  that  of  the  children.  For  what 
are  the  conditions  ?  Some  one  feels  an  impulse  to  express  some- 
thing, and  at  the  moment  has  not  got  the  traditional  form  at 
command,  and  so  is  driven  to  evolve  a  form  of  his  own  from  the 
rest  of  the  linguistic  material.  It  makes  no  difference  whether 
he  has  never  heard  a  form  used  by  other  people  which  expresses 
what  he  wants,  or  whether  he  has  heard  the  traditional  form, 
but  has  not  got  it  ready  at  hand  at  the  moment.  The  method  of 
procedure  is  exactly  the  same  whether  it  takes  place  in  a  three- 
year-old  or  in  an  eighty-three -year-old  brain :  it  is  therefore 
senseless  to  put  the  question  whether  formations  by  analogy  are 
or  are  not  due  to  children.  A  formation  by  analogy  is  by 
definition  a  non-traditional  form.  It  is  therefore  idle  to  ask  if 
it  is  due  to  the  fact  that  the  language  is  transmitted  from  generation 
to  generation  and  to  the  child's  imperfect  repetition  of  what  has 
been  transmitted  to  it,  and  Meringer 's  argument  thus  breaks 
down  in  every  respect. 

It  must  not,  of  course,  be  overlooked  that  children  naturally 
come  to  invent  more  formations  by  analogy  than  grown-up  people, 


1G4  THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  CHH.D       [cii,  ix 

because  the  latter  in  many  cases  have  heard  the  older  forms  so 
often  that  they  find  a  place  in  their  speech  without  any  effort 
being  required  to  recall  them.  But  that  does  not  touch  the 
problem  under  discussion  ;  besides,  formations  by  analogy  are 
unavoidable  and  indispensable,  in  the  talk  of  all,  even  of  the 
most  'grown-up':  one  cannot,  indeed,  move  in  language  without 
having  recourse  to  forms  and  constructions  that  are  not  duectly 
and  fully  transmitted  to  us  :  speech  is  not  alone  reproduction, 
but  just  as  much  new-production,  because  no  situation  and  no 
impulse  to  communication  is  in  every  detail  exactly  the  same 
as  what  has  occurred  on  earlier  occasions. 


IX.— §  3.  Herzog's  Theory  of  Sound  Changes. 

If,  leaving  the  field  of  analogical  changes,  we  begin  to  inquire 
whether  the  purely  phonetic  changes  can  or  must  be  ascribed  to 
the  fact  that  a  new  generation  has  to  learn  the  mother-tongue 
by  imitation,  we  shall  first  have  to  examine  an  interesting  theory 
in  which  the  question  is  answered  in  the  affirmative,  at  least  with 
regard  to  those  phonetic  changes  which  are  gradual  and  not 
brought  about  all  at  once ;  thus,  when  in  one  particular  language 
one  vowel,  say  [e],  is  pronounced  more  and  more  closely  till 
finally  it  becomes  [i*],  as  has  happened  in  E.  see,  formerly  pro- 
nounced [se-]  with  the  same  vowel  as  in  G.  see,  now  [si'].  E. 
Herzog  maintains  that  such  changes  happen  through  transference 
to  new  generations,  even  granted  that  the  children  imitate  the 
sound  of  the  grown-up  people  perfectly.  For,  it  is  said,  children 
with  their  little  mouths  cannot  produce  acoustically  the  same 
sound  as  adults,  except  by  a  different  position  of  the  speech- 
organs  ;  this  position  they  keep  for  the  rest  of  their  lives,  so  that 
when  they  are  grown-up  and  their  mouth  is  of  full  size  they  produce 
a  rather  different  sound  from  that  previously  heard — which  altered 
sound  is  again  imitated  by  the  next  generation  with  yet  another 
position  of  the  organs,  and  so  on.  This  continuous  play  of 
generation  v.  generation  may  be  illustrated  in  this  way  : 

Articulation   corresponding  to  Sound. 

fyoung  Al SI 

1st   generation|^j^    ^   ^^ 

fyoung   A2 
2nd  generation|^j^        A2 


S2 

S2 

S3 

S3 

S4,etc.i 

»  See  E.  Herzog,  Streitfragen  der  roman.  philologie,  i.  (1904),  p.   57 — I 
modify  his  symbols  a  little. 


«  1  J.-      fyoung   A3 

3rd  generation|^j^         ^3 


§  3]     HERZOG'S  THEORY  OF  SOUND  CHANGES    165 

It  is,  however,  easy  to  prove  that  this  theory  cannot  be  correct. 
(1)  It  is  quite  certain  that  the  increase  in  size  of  the  mouth  is 
far  less  important  than  is  generally  supposed  (see  my  Fonetik, 
p.  379  fif.,  PhG,  p.  80  ff. ;  cf .  above,  V  §  1).  (2)  It  cannot  be  proved 
that  people,  after  once  learning  one  definite  way  of  producing  a 
sound,  go  on  producing  it  in  exactly  the  same  way,  even  if  the 
acoustic  result  is  a  different  one.  It  is  much  more  probable  that 
each  individual  is  constantly  adapting  himself  to  the  sounds  heard 
from  those  around  him,  even  if  this  adaptation  is  neither  as 
quick  nor  perhaps  as  perfect  as  that  of  children,  who  can  very 
rapidly  accommodate  their  speech  to  the  dialect  of  new  surround- 
ings :  if  very  far-reaching  changes  are  rare  in  the  case  of  grown-up 
people,  this  proves  nothing  against  such  small  adaptations  as 
are  here  presupposed.  In  favour  of  the  continual  regulation  of 
the  sound  thi-ough  the  ear  may  be  adduced  the  fact  that  adults 
who  become  perfectly  deaf  and  thus  lose  the  control  of  sounds 
through  hearing  may  come  to  speak  in  such  a  way  that  their 
words  can  hardly  be  understood  by  others.  (3)  The  theory  in 
question  also  views  the  relations  between  successive  generations 
in  a  way  that  is  far  removed  from  the  realities  of  life :  from  the 
wording  one  might  easilj^  imagine  that  there  were  living  together 
at  any  given  time  only  individuals  of  ages  separated  by,  say, 
thirty  years'  distance,  while  the  truth  of  the  matter  is  that  a 
child  is  normally  surrounded  by  people  of  all  ages  and  learns  its 
language  more  or  less  from  all  of  them,  from  Grannie  down  to 
little  Dick  from  over  the  way,  and  that  (as  has  already  been 
remarked)  its  cliief  teachers  are  its  own  brothers  and  sisters  and 
other  playmates  of  about  the  same  age  as  itself.  If  the  theory 
were  correct,  there  would  at  any  rate  be  a  marked  difference 
in  vowel-sounds  between  anyone  and  his  grandfather,  or,  still 
more,  great-grandfather  :  but  nothing  of  the  kind  has  ever  been 
described.  (4)  The  chief  argument,  however,  against  the  theory 
is  this,  that  were  it  true,  then  all  shiftings  of  sounds  at  all  times 
and  in  all  languages  would  proceed  in  exactly  the  same  direction. 
But  this  is  emphatically  contradicted  bj'  the  history  of  language. 
The  long  a  in  English  in  one  period  was  rounded  and  raised  into 
o,  as  in  OE.  sfan,  na,  ham,  which  have  become  stone,  no,  home  ; 
but  when  a  few  centuries  later  new  long  a's  had  entered  the 
language,  they  followed  the  opposite  direction  towards  e,  now 
[ei],  as  in  name,  male,  take.  Similarly  in  Danish,  where  an  old 
stratum  of  long  a's  have  become  d,  as  in  dl,  gas,  while  a  later  stratum 
tends  rather  towards  [ae],  as  in  the  present  pronunciation  of  gade, 
hale,  etc.  At  the  same  time  the  long  a  in  Swedish  tends  towards 
the  rounded  pronunciation  (cf .  Fr.  dme,  pas) :  in  one  sister  language 
wo  thus  witness  a  repetition  of  the  old  shifting,  in  the  other  a 


106  THE  INFLUENCE   OF  THE   CHILD       [cii.  ix 

teudcnuy  in  the  opposite  direction.  And  it  is  the  same  with  all 
those  languages  which  we  can  pui'sue  far  enough  back  :  they  all 
present  the  same  picture  of  varying  vowel  shiftings  in  different 
directions,  which  is  totally  incompatible  with  Herzog's  view. 


IX.— §  4.  Gradual  Shiftings. 

Wo  shall  do  well  to  put  aside  such  artificial  theories  and  look 
soberly  at  the  facts.  When  some  sounds  in  one  century  go  one 
way,  and  in  another,  another,  while  at  times  they  remain  long 
unchanged,  it  all  rests  on  this,  that  for  human  habits  of  this  sort 
there  is  no  standard  measure.  Set  a  man  to  saw  a  hundred  logs, 
measuring  No.  2  by  No.  1,  No.  3  by  No.  2,  and  so  on,  and  you  will 
see  considerable  deviations  from  the  original  measure — perhaps 
all  going  in  the  same  direction,  so  that  No.  100  is  very  much 
longer  than  No.  1  as  the  result  of  the  sum  of  a  great  many  small 
deviations — perhaps  all  going  in  the  opposite  direction  ;  but  it 
is  also  possible  that  in  a  certain  series  he  was  inclined  to  make 
the  logs  too  long,  and  in  the  next  series  too  short,  the  two  sets 
of  deviations  about  balancing  one  another. 

It  is  much  the  same  with  the  formation  of  speech  sounds  : 
at  one  moment,  for  some  reason  or  other,  in  a  particular  mood, 
in  order  to  lend  authority  or  distinction  to  our  words,  we  may 
happen  to  lower  the  jaw  a  little  more,  or  to  thrust  the  tongue  a 
little  more  forward  than  usual,  or  inversely,  under  the  influence 
of  fatigue  or  laziness,  or  to  sneer  at  someone  else,  or  because  we 
have  a  cigar  or  potato  in  our  mouth,  the  movements  of  the  jaw 
or  of  the  tongue  may  fall  short  of  what  they  usually  are.  We 
have  all  the  while  a  sort  of  conception  of  an  average  pronunciation, 
of  a  normal  degree  of  opening  or  of  protrusion,  which  Ave  aim 
at,  but  it  is  nothing  very  fixed,  and  the  only  measure  at  our  dis- 
posal is  that  we  are  or  are  not  understood.  What  is  understood 
is  all  right :  what  does  not  meet  this  requirement  must  be  repeated 
with  greater  correctness  as  an  answer  to  '  I  beg  5"our  pardon  ?  ' 

Everyone  thinks  that  he  talks  to-day  just  as  he  did  yesterdaj', 
and,  of  course,  he  does  so  in  nearly  every  point.  But  no  one  knows 
if  he  pronounces  his  mother-tongue  in  every  resjaect  in  the  same 
manner  as  he  did  twenty  years  ago.  May  we  not  suppose  that  what 
happens  with  faces  happens  here  also  ?  One  lives  with  a  friend  day 
in  and  day  out,  and  he  appears  to  be  just  what  he  was  years  ago,  but 
someone  who  returns  home  after  a  long  absence  is  at  once  struck 
by  the  changes  which  have  gradually  accumulated  in  the  interval. 

Changes  in  the  sounds  of  a  language  are  not,  indeed,  so  rapid 
as  those  in  the  appearance  of  an  individual,  for  the  simple  reason 
that  it  is  not  enough  for  one  man  to  alter  his  pronunciation, 


§  4]  GRADUAL   SHIFTINGS  167 

many  must  co-opcratc  :  the  social  nature  and  social  aim  of  lan- 
guage has  the  natural  consequence  that  all  must  combine  in  the 
same  movement,  or  else  one  neutralizes  the  changes  introduced 
by  the  other  ;  each  individual  also  is  continually  under  the  influ- 
ence of  his  fellows,  and  involuntarily  fashions  his  pronunciation 
according  to  the  impression  he  is  constantl}'  receiving  of  other 
people's  sounds.  But  as  regards  those  little  gradual  shif tings  of 
sounds  which  take  place  in  spite  of  all  this  control  and  its  con- 
servative influence,  changes  in  which  the  sound  and  the  articulation 
alter  simultaneously,  I  cannot  see  that  the  transmission  of  the 
language  to  a  new  generation  need  exert  any  essential  influence  : 
we  may  imagine  them  being  brought  about  equally  well  in  a  society 
which  for  hundreds  of  years  consisted  of  the  same  adults  who 
never  died  and  had  no  issue. 

IX.— §5.  Leaps. 

While  in  the  shiftings  mentioned  in  the  last  paragraphs 
articulation  and  acoustic  impression  went  side  by  side,  it  is 
different  with  some  shiftings  in  which  the  old  sound  and  the  new 
resemble  one  another  to  the  ear,  but  differ  in  the  position  of  the 
organs  and  the  articulations.  For  instance,  when  [}?]  as  in  E. 
tkich  becomes  [f]  and  [6]  as  in  E.  mother  becomes  [v],  one  can 
hardly  conceive  the  change  taking  place  in  the  pronunciation  of 
people  who  have  learnt  the  right  sound  as  children.  It  is  verj'' 
natural,  on  the  other  hand,  that  children  should  imitate  the 
harder  sound  by  giving  the  easier,  which  is  very  like  it,  and  which 
they  have  to  use  in  many  other  words  :  forms  like  fru  for  through, 
wiv,  muvver  for  tvith,  mother,  are  frec[uent  in  the  mouths  of  children 
long  before  they  begin  to  make  their  apj)earance  in  the  speech 
of  adults,  where  they  are  now  beginning  to  be  very  frequent  in 
the  Cockney  dialect.  (Cf.  MEG  i.  13.  9.)  The  same  transition  is 
met  with  in  Old  Fr.,  where  we  have  inuef  from  modu,  nif  from 
nidu,  fief  irom  feodu,  self,  now  soif,  from  site,  estrif  (E.  strife)  from 
stridh,  glaive  from  gladiu,  parvis  from  paradis,  and  possibly  avoidre 
from  adulteru,  poveir,  now  pouvoir,  from  potere.  In  Old  Gothonic 
we  have  the  transition  from  p  to  f  before  I,  as  in  Goth.  ]>laqus= 
MHG.  vlach,  Goth.  plaihmi=  OB.G.  flehan,  y>liuhan=011G.  fliohan  ; 
cf.  also  E.  file,  G.  feile=0'N.  y>el,  OE.  pengel  and  fengel  'prince,' 
and  probably  G.  finster,  cf .  OHG.  dinstar  (with  d  from  ]>),  OE.  '\>eostre. 
In  Latin  we  have  the  same  transition,  e.g.  in  fumus,  corresponding 
to  Sansk.  dhumds,  Gr.  thumos} 

*  In  Russian  Marfa,  Fyodor,  etc.,  we  also  have/  corresponding  to  original 
]?,  but  in  this  case  it  is  not  a  transition  within  one  and  the  same  language, 
but  an  imperfect  imitation  on  the  part  of  the  (adult !)  Russians  of  a  sound 
in  a  foreign  language  (Greek  th)  which  was  not  found  in  their  own  language. 


168  THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  CHILD      [en.  ix 

The  change  from  the  back-open  consonant  [x] — the  sound  in 
G.  buch  and  Scotch  loch — to  /,  which  has  taken  place  in  enough, 
cough,  etc.,  is  of  the  same  kind.  Here  clearly  we  have  no  gradual 
passage,  but  a  jump,  which  could  hardly  take  place  in  the  case 
of  those  who  had  already  learnt  how  to  pronounce  the  back 
sound,  but  is  easily  conceivable  as  a  case  of  defective  imitation 
on  the  part  of  a  new  generation.  I  suppose  that  the  same  remark 
holds  good  with  regard  to  the  change  from  ho  to  p,  which  is  found 
in  some  languages,  for  instance,  Gr.  hijypos,  corresponding  to  Lat. 
equus,  Gr.  he2)omai=Lsit.  sequor,  he2)ar='Lsit.  jecur ;  Rumanian 
apa  from  Lat.  aqua,  Welsh  ma]),  'son  '  =  Gaelic  mac,  pedzvar=li'. 
cathir,  'four,'  etc.  In  Franco  I  have  heard  children  say  [pizin] 
and  [pidin]  for  cuisine. 


IX. — §6.  Assimilations,  etc. 

There  is  an  important  class  of  sound  changes  which  have 
this  in  common  with  the  class  just  treated,  that  the  changes  take 
place  suddenly,  without  an  intermediate  stage  being  possible,  as 
in  the  changes  considered  in  IX  §4.  I  refer  to  those  cases 
of  assimilation,  loss  of  consonants  in  heavy  groups  and  trans- 
position (metathesis),  with  which  students  of  language  are  familiar 
in  all  languages.  Instances  abound  in  the  speech  of  all  children  ; 
see  above,  V  §4. 

If  now  we  dared  to  assert  that  such  pronunciations  are  never 
heard  from  people  who  have  passed  their  babyhood,  we  should 
here  have  foimd  a  field  in  which  children  have  exercised  a  great 
influence  on  the  development  of  language  :  but  of  course  we 
cannot  say  anything  of  the  sort.  Any  attentive  observer  can 
testify  to  the  frequency  of  such  mispronunciations  in  the  speech 
of  grown-up  people.  In  many  cases  they  are  noticed  neither  by 
the  speaker  nor  by  the  hearer,  in  many  they  may  be  noticed,  but 
are  considered  too  unimportant  to  be  corrected,  and  finally,  in 
some  cases  the  speaker  stops  to  repeat  what  he  wanted  to  say  in 
a  corrected  form.  Now  it  would  not  obviously  do,  from  their 
frequency  in  adult  speech,  to  draw  the  inference  :  "  These  changes 
are  not  to  be  ascribed  to  children,"  because  from  their  frequent 
appearance  on  the  lips  of  the  children  one  could  equally  well  infer  : 
"They  are  not  to  be  ascribed  to  groT\Ti-up  people."  When  we 
find  in  Latin  impotens  and  immeritus  with  m  side  by  side  with 
indignus  and  insolitus  with  n,  or  when  English  handkerchief  is 
pronounced  with  [T^k]  instead  of  the  original  [ndk],  the  change 
is  not  to  be  charged  against  children  or  growii-up  people  exclu- 
sively, but  against  both  parties  together :  and  so  when  t  is  lost 
in  ivaistcoat  [weskat],  or  postman  or  castle,  or  A*  in  asked.    There 


§  G]  ASSBIILATIONS  169 

is  certainly  this  difference,  that  when  the  change  is  made  by  older 
people,  we  get  in  the  speech  of  the  same  individual  first  the  heavier 
and  then  the  easier  form,  while  the  child  may  take  up  the  easier 
pronunciation  first,  because  it  hears  the  [n]  before  a  lip  consonant 
as  [m],  and  before  a  back  consonant  as  [y],  or  because  it  fails 
altogether  to  hear  the  middle  consonant  in  waistcoat,  2^ost'man, 
castle  and  asked.  But  all  this  is  clearly  of  purely  theoretical 
interest,  and  the  result  remains  that  the  influence  of  the  two 
classes,  adults  and  children,  cannot  possibly  be  separated  in  this 
domain.^ 


IX.— §7.  Stump-words. 

Next  we  come  to  those  changes  which  result  in  what  one  may 
call  'stump- words.'  There  is  no  doubt  that  words  may  undergo 
violent  shortenings  both  by  children  and  adults,  but  here  I  believe 
we  can  more  or  less  definitel}^  distinguish  between  their  respective 
contributions  to  the  development  of  language.  If  it  is  the  end 
of  the  word  that  is  kept,  while  the  beginning  is  drojDped,  it  is 
probable  that  the  mutilation  is  due  to  children,  who,  as  we  have 
seen  (VII  §7),  echo  the  conclusion  of  what  is  said  to  them  and 
forget  the  beginning  or  fail  altogether  to  apprehend  it.  So  we 
get  a  number  of  mutilated  Christian  names,  w^hich  can  then  be 
used  by  groA^Ti-up  people  as  pet-names.  Examples  are  Bert  for 
Herbert  or  Albert,  Bella  for  Ai*abella,  Sander  for  Alexander,  Lottie 
for  Charlotte,  Trix  for  Beatrix,  and  with  childlike  sound-substitu- 
tion Bess  (and  Bet,  Betty)  for  Elizabeth.  Similarly  in  other 
languages,  from  Danish  I  may  mention  Bine  for  Jakobine,  Line 
for  Karoline,  Sti^ie  for  Kristine,  Dres  for  Andres  :  there  are  many 
others. 

If  this  way  of  shortening  a  word  is  natural  to  a  child  who 
hears  the  word  for  the  first  time  and  is  not  able  to  remember 
the  beginning  when  he  comes  to  the  end  of  it,  it  is  quite  different 
when  others  clip  words  which  they  know  perfectly  well  :  they 
will  naturally  keep  the  beginning  and  stop  before  they  are  half 
through  the  word,  as  soon  as  they  are  sure  that  their  hearers 
understand  what  is  alluded  to.  Dr.  Johnson  was  not  the  only 
one  who  "  had  a  way  of  contracting  the  names  of  his  friends,  as 
Beauclerc,  Beau ;  Boswell,  Bozzy ;  Langton,  Lanhj ;  Murphy, 
Miir ;    Sheridan,    Sherry ;    and    Goldsmith,    Goldy,   which    Gold- 

^  Reduplications  and  assimilations  at  a  distance,  as  in  Fr.  tante  from 
the  older  ayUe  (whence  E.  aunt,  from  Lat.  amita)  and  porpentine  (frequent 
in  this  and  analogous  forms  in  Elizabethan  writers)  for  porcupme  (porkepine, 
porkespine)  are  different  from  the  ordinary  assimilations  of  neighbouring 
sounds  in  occurring  much  less  frequently  in  the  speech  of  adults  than  in 
children  ;  of.,  however,  below,  Ch.  XV  4. 


170  THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE   CHILD       [ch.  ix 

smitli  resented"  (Boswell,  Life,  cd.  P.  Fitzgerald,  1900,  i.  48G). 
Tliackeray  eonstantly  says  Pen  for  Aithur  Pendennis,  Cos  for 
Costigan,  Fo  for  Foker,  Pop  for  Popjoy,  old  Col  for  Colchicuni. 
In  the  beginning  of  the  last  century  Najioleon  Bonaparte  was 
generally  called  Nap  or  Boney  ;  later  we  have  such  shortened 
names  of  jDublic  characters  as  Dizzy  for  Disraeli,  Pam  for  Palmerston , 
Labby  for  Labouchere,  etc.  These  evidently  are  due  to  adults, 
and  so  are  a  great  many  other  clippings,  some  of  which  have 
completely  ousted  the  original  long  words,  such  as  mob  for  mobile, 
brig  for  brigantine,  fad  for  fadaise,  cab  for  cabriolet,  navvy  for 
navigator,  while  others  are  still  felt  as  abbreviations,  such  as 
plioto  for  photogi'aj^h,  ^;«6  for  public-house,  caps  for  capital  letters, 
spec  for  speculation,  sov  for  sovereign,  ze2'>  for  Zeppelin,  divvy 
for  dividend,  hip  for  hypochondria,  the  Cri  and  the  Pavvy  for  the 
Criterion  and  the  Pavilion,  and  many  other  clippings  of  words 
which  are  evidently  far  above  the  level  of  very  small  children. 
The  same  is  true  of  the  abbreviations  in  which  school  and  college 
slang  abounds,  words  like  Gym(nastica),  V7idergrad{uate),  trig- 
(onometry),  Za6(orator3^),  wio/nc(ulation),  ^re2>(aration),  the  Giiv 
for  the  governor,  etc.  The  same  remark  is  true  of  similar 
clippings  in  other  languages,  such  as  kilo  for  kilogram,  G.  ober 
for  oberkellner,  French  om/o(crate),  reac(tionnaire),  college  terms 
like  desse  for  descriptive  (geometric  d.),  philo  for  philosophic, 
^jrew  for  premier,  seu  for  second ;  Danish  numerals  like  tres 
for  tresindstyve  (60),  halvfjerds(in.dBiy\e),  ytr5(indstyve).  We  are 
certainly  justified  in  extending  the  principle  that  abbreviation 
through  throwing  away  the  end  of  the  word  is  due  to  those  who 
have  previous!}^  mastered  the  full  form,  to  the  numerous  instances 
of  shortened  Christian  names  like  Fred  for  Frederick,  Em  for 
Emily,  Alec  for  Alexander,  Di  for  Diana,  Vic  for  Victoria,  etc. 
In  other  languages  we  find  similar  clippings  of  names  more  or 
less  carried  through  systematically,  e.g.  Greek  Zeiixis  for  Zeuxippos, 
Old  High  German  Wolfo  for  Wolfbrand,  Wolfgang,  etc.,  Icelandic 
Sigga  for  Sigridr,  Siggi  for  SigurSr,  etc. 

I  see  a  corroboration  of  my  theory  in  the  fact  that  there  are 
hardly  an}^  family  names  shortened  by  throwing  away  the  begin- 
ning :  children  as  a  rule  have  no  use  for  family  names.^  The 
rule,  however,  is  not  laid  down  as  absolute,  but  only  as  holding 
in  the  main.  Some  of  the  exceptions  are  easily  accounted  for. 
'Cello  for  violoncello  undoubtedly  is  an  adults'  word,  originating 

^  Karl  Sund<^n,  in  his  diligent  and  painstaking  book  on  Elliptical  Words 
?n  Modern  Ei^glish  (Upsala,  1904)  [i.e.  clipped  proper  names,  for  common 
names  are  not  treated  in  the  long  lists  given],  mentions  only  two  examples 
of  surnames  in  which  the  final  part  is  kept  (Bart  for  Islebart,  Piggy  for 
Guineapig,  from  obscure  novels),  though  he  has  scores  of  examples  in  which 
the  beginning  is  preserved. 


§  7]  STUMP-WORDS  171 

in  Fiance  or  Italy  :  but  here  evidently  it  would  not  do  to  take 
the  beginning,  for  then  there  would  be  confusion  with  violin 
(violon).  Phone  for  telephone  :  the  beginning  might  just  as  well 
stand  for  telegraph.  Van  for  caravan  :  here  the  beginning  would 
be  identical  with  car.  Bus,  which  made  its  appearance  immediately 
after  the  first  omnibus  was  started  in  the  streets  of  liondon 
(1829),  probably  was  thought  expressive  of  the  sound  of  these 
vehicles  and  suggested  bustle.  But  bacco  {baccer,  baccy)  for  tobacco 
and  taters  for  potatoes  belong  to  a  diJBferent  sphere  altogether  : 
they  are  not  clippings  of  the  usual  sort,  but  purely  phonetic 
developments,  in  which  the  first  vowel  has  been  dropped  in  rapid 
pronunciation  (as  in  /  s'pose),  and  the  initial  voiceless  stop  has 
then  become  inaudible ;  Dickens  similarly  writes  HicJcerlerly  as 
a  vulgar  pronunciation  of  particularly.^ 

1  It  is  often  said  that  stress  is  decisive  of  what  part  is  left  out  in  word- 
chppings,  and  from  an  a  priori  point  of  view  this  is  what  we  should  expect. 
But  as  a  matter  of  fact  we  find  in  many  instances  that  sj'Uables  with  weak 
stress  are  preserved,  e.g.  in  JV/ac(donald),  Pen{denni8),  the  Cri,  Vic,  Nap, 
Nat  for  Nathaniel  (orig.  pronounced  with  [t],  not  [p]),  Val  for  Percival, 
Tru,  etc.  The  middle  is  never  kept  as  such  wnth  omission  of  the  beginning 
and  the  ending  ;  Liz  (whence  Lizzy)  has  not  arisen  at  one  stroke  from  Eliza- 
beth, but  mediately  through  Eliz.  Somo  of  the  adults'  clippings  originate 
through  abbreviations  in  writing,  thus  probably  most  of  the  college  terms 
{exam,  trig,  etc.),  thus  also  journalists'  clippings  like  ad  for  advertisement, 
par  for  paragraph  ;  cf.  also  caps  for  capitals.  On  stump -words  see  also 
below,  Ch.  XIV,  §§8  and  9. 


I 


CHAPTER  X 
THE  INFLUENCE   OF  THE    CKlLD—continned 

§  1.  Confusion  of  Words.  §  2.  Metanalysis.  §  3.  Shif tings  of  Meanings. 
§  4.  Differentiations.  §  5.  Summary.  §  6.  Indirect  Influence.  §  7. 
New  Languages. 

X.— §  1.  Confusion  of  Words. 

Some  of  the  most  typical  childish  sound-substitutions  can  hardly 
be  supposed  to  leave  any  traces  in  language  as  permanently 
spoken,  because  they  are  always  thoroughly  corrected  by  the 
children  themselves  at  an  early  age ;  among  these  I  reckon  the  almost 
universal  pronunciation  of  t  instead  of  k.  When,  therefore,  we 
do  find  that  in  some  words  a  t  has  taken  the  place  of  an  earlier 
Jc,  we  must  look  for  some  more  specific  cau.se  of  the  change  :  but 
this  ma3%  in  some  cases  at  any  rate,  be  found  in  a  tendency  of 
children's  speech  which  is  totally  independent  of  the  inabilitj' 
to  pronounce  the  sound  of  k  at  an  early  age,  and  is,  indeed,  in 
no  way  to  be  reckoned  among  phonetic  tendencies,  namely,  the 
confusion  resulting  from  an  association  of  two  words  of  similar 
sound  (cf.  above,  p.  122).  This,  I  take  it,  is  the  explanation  of 
the  word  mate  in  the  sense  '  husband  or  wife,'  which  has  replaced 
the  earlier  7nake  :  a  confusion  was  here  natural,  because  the  word 
mate,  '  companion,'  was  similar  not  only  in  sound,  but  also  in 
signification.  The  older  name  for  the  '  soft  roe  '  of  fishes  was 
milk  (as  Dan.  mcelk,  G.  milch),  but  from  the  fifteenth  centurj^* 
milt  has  been  substituted  for  it,  as  if  it  were  the  same  organ  as 
the  milt,  '  the  spleen.*  Children  will  associate  words  of  similar 
sound  even  in  cases  where  there  is  no  connecting  link  in  their 
significations  ;  thus  we  have  bat  for  earlier  bak,  bakke  (the  animal, 
vespertilio),  though  the  other  word  bat,  '  a  stick,'  is  far  removed 
in  sense. 

I  think  we  must  explain  the  following  cases  of  isolated  sound - 
substitution  as  due  to  the  same  confusion  with  unconnected  words 
in  the  minds  of  children  hearing  the  new  words  for  the  first  time  : 
trunk  in  the  sense  of  '  proboscis  of  an  elephant,'  formerly  trnmp, 
from  Fr.  trompe,  confused  with  trunk,  '  stem  of  a  tree  ' ;  stark- 
naked,  formerly  start-naked,  from  start,  '  tail,'  confused  with  stark, 
'  stiff ' ;     ve7it,    '  air-hole,'    from    Fr.  fente,    confused    with    vent, 

173 


§1]  CONFUSION    OF   WORDS  173 

'  breath  '  (for  this  v  cannot  be  due  to  the  Southern  dialectal  transi- 
tion from  /,  as  in  vat  from  fat,  for  that  transition  does  not,  as  a  rule, 
take  place  in  French  loans) ;  cocoa  for  cacao,  confused  with  coco- 
nut :  match,  from  Fr.  meche,  by  confusion  with  the  other  match  ; 
chine,  'rim  of  cask,'  from  chime,  cf,  G.  kimme,  'border,'  confused 
with  chine,  '  backbone.'  I  give  some  of  these  examples  with  a 
little  diffidence,  though  I  have  no  doubt  of  the  general  principle 
of  childish  confusion  of  unrelated  words  as  one  of  the  sources  of 
irregularities  in  the  development  cf  sounds. 

These  substitutions  cannot  of  course  be  separated  from 
instances  of  '  popular  etymology,'  as  when  the  phrase  to  cnny 
favour  was  substituted  for  the  former  to  curry  favel,  where  favel 
means  '  a  fallow  horse,'  as  the  t3^pe  of  fraud  or  duplicity  (cf.  G. 
den  fahlen  hengst  reiten,  'to  act  deceitfully,'  einen  avf  einem 
fahlen  pferde  ertappen,  '  to  catch  someone  lying  '). 

X.— §2.  Metanalysis. 

We  now  come  to  the  phenomenon  for  which  I  have  ventured 
to  coin  the  term  '  metanalysis,'  by  Avhich  I  mean  that  words  or 
word-groups  are  by  a  new  generation  analyzed  differently  from 
the  analysis  of  a  former  age.  Each  child  has  to  find  out  for  himself, 
in  hearing  the  connected  speech  of  other  people,  where  one  word 
ends  and  the  next  one  begins,  or  what  belongs  to  the  kernel  and 
what  to  the  ending  of  a  word,  etc.  (VII  §6).  In  most  cases  he 
will  arrive  at  the  same  analysis  as  the  former  generation,  but  now 
and  then  he  will  put  the  boundaries  in  another  place  than  formerlj^ 
and  the  new  analysis  may  become  general.  A  naddre  (the  ME. 
form  for  OE.  an  ncedre)  thus  became  an  adder,  a  napron  became 
an  apron,  an  naiiger :  an  auger,  a  numpire :  an  umpire  ;  and  in 
psychologically  the  same  way  an  ewte  (older  form  evete,  OE.  efete) 
became  a  newt :  metanalj^sis  accordingly  sometimes  shortens  and 
sometimes  lengthens  a  word.  Riding  as  a  name  of  one  of  the  three 
districts  of  Yorkshire  is  due  to  a  metanalysis  of  North  Thriding 
(ON.  yridjungr,  '  third  part '),  as  well  as  of  East  Thriding,  West 
Thriding,  after  the  sound  of  th  had  been  assimilated  to  the 
preceding  t. 

One  of  the  most  frequent  forms  of  metanalj^sis  consists  in  the 
subtraction  of  an  s,  which  originally  belonged  to  the  kernel  of  a 
word,  but  is  mistaken  for  the  plural  ending ;  in  this  way  we  have 
pea  instead  of  the  earlier  peas,  pease,  cherry  for  ME.  cherris,  Fr. 
cerise,  asset  from  assets,  Fr.  assez,  etc,  Cf.  also  the  vulgar  Chinee, 
Portuguee,  etc.^ 

*  See  my  MEG  ii.  6.  6,  and  my  paper  on  '  Subtraktionsdannelser,"  in 
Festskrijt  til  Vilh.  Thomsen,  1894,  p.  1  ff. 


174  THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  CHILD        [en.  x 

The  influence  of  a  new  generation  is  also  seen  in  those  cases 
in  which  formerly  separate  words  coalesce  into  one,  as  when  he 
breakfasts,  he  breakfasted,  is  said  instead  of  he  breaks  fast,  he  broke 
fast  ;  cf,  vouchsafe,  don  (third  person,  vouchsafes,  dovs),  instead  of 
I'owc/t  safe,  do  on  (third  person,  vouches  safe,  does  on).  Here,  too, 
it  is  not  probable  that  a  person  who  has  once  learnt  the  real  form 
of  a  word,  and  thus  knows  where  it  begins  and  where  it  ends, 
should  have  subsequentl}-  changed  it :  it  is  much  more  likelj'  that 
all  such  changes  originate  with  children  who  have  once  made 
a  wrong  analysis  of  what  they  have  heard  and  then  go  on  repeating 
the  new  forms  all  their  lives. 


X.— §  3.  Shiftings  of  Meanings. 

Changes  in  the  meaning  of  words  are  often  so  gradual  that 
one  cannot  detect  the  different  steps  of  the  process,  and  changes 
of  this  sort,  like  the  corresponding  changes  in  the  sounds  of  M-ords, 
are  to  be  ascribed  quite  as  much  to  people  already  acquainted 
with  the  language  as  to  the  new  generation.  As  examples  we 
may  mention  the  laxity  that  has  changed  the  meaning  of  somi, 
which  in  OE.  meant  '  at  once,'  and  in  the  same  way  of  presently, 
originally  '  at  present,  now,'  and  of  the  old  a7i07i.  Dinner  comes 
from  OF.  disner,  which  is  the  infinitive  of  the  verb  which  in  other 
forms  was  desjeun,  whence  modern  French  dtjeune  (Lat.  *desje- 
junare) ;  it  thus  meant  '  breakfast,'  but  the  hour  of  the  meal 
thus  termed  was  gradually  shifted  in  the  course  of  centuries,  so 
that  now  we  may  have  dinner  twelve  hours  after  breakfast.  When 
picture,  which  originally  meant  '  painting,'  came  to  be  applied  to 
drawings,  photographs  and  other  images  ;  when  hard  came  to 
be  used  as  an  epithet  not  only  of  nuts  and  stones,  etc.,  but  of  words 
and  labour ;  when  fair,  besides  the  old  sense  of  '  beautiful,' 
acquired  those  of  '  blond  '  and  '  morally  just '  ;  when  meat,  from* 
meaning  all  kinds  of  food  (as  in  siveetmeats,  meat  and  drink),  came 
to  be  restricted  practically  to  one  kind  of  food  (butcher's  meat)  ; 
when  the  verb  grow,  which  at  first  w&s  used  onlj-  of  plants,  came 
to  be  used  of  animals,  hairs,  nails,  feelings,  etc.,  and,  instead  of 
implying  always  increase,  might  even  be  combined  with  such  a 
predicative  as  smaller  and  smaller  ;  when  pretty,  from  the  meaning 
'skilful,  ingenious,'  came  to  be  a  general  epithet  of  approval 
(cf.  the  modern  American,  a  cunning  child='  sweet '),  and,  besides 
meaning  good-looking,  became  an  adverb  of  degree,  as  in  pretty 
bad  :  neither  these  nor  countless  similar  shiftings  need  be  ascribed 
to  any  influence  on  the  part  of  the  learners  of  English  ;  they  can 
easily  be  accounted  for  as  the  product  of  innumerable  small 
extensions  and  restrictions  on  the  part  of  the  users  of  the  language 
after  they  have  once  acquired  it. 


§3]  SHIFTINGS   OF   MEANINGS  175 

But  along  with  changes  of  this  sort  we  have  others  that  have 
come  about  with  a  leap,  and  in  ^hich  it  is  imi)ossible  to  find 
intermediate  stages  betAveen  two  seemingly  heterogeneous  meanings, 
as  when  bead,  from  meaning  a  '  prayer,'  comes  to  mean  '  a  per- 
forated ball  of  glass  or  amber.'  In  these  cases  the  change  is  occa- 
sioned by  certain  connexions,  where  the  whole  sense  can  only  be 
taken  in  one  way,  but  the  syntactical  construction  admits  of 
various  interpretations,  so  that  an  ambiguity  at  one  point  gives 
occasion  for  a  new  conception  of  the  meaning  of  the  word.  The 
phrase  to  count  your  beads  originally  meant  '  to  count  j'our 
prayers,'  but  because  the  prayers  were  reckoned  by  little  balls, 
the  word  beads  came  to  be  transferred  to  these  objects,  and  lost 
its  original  sense. ^  It  seems  clear  that  this  misapprehension  could 
not  take  place  in  the  brains  of  those  who  had  already  associated 
the  word  with  the  original  signification,  while  it  was  quite  natural 
on  the  part  of  children  \Aho  heard  and  understood  the  jDhrase 
as  a  whole,  but  unconsciously  analyzed  it  differently  from  the 
previous  generation. 

There  is  another  word  which  also  meant  '  prayer  '  originally, 
but  has  lost  that  meaning,  viz.  boon  ;  through  such  phrases  as 
'  ask  a  boon  '  and  '  grant  a  boon  '  it  came  to  be  taken  as  meaning 
'  a  favour  '  or  '  a  good  thing  received.' 

Orient  was  frequently  used  in  such  connexions  as  '  orient 
pearl  '  and  '  orient  gem,'  and  as  these  were  lustrous,  orient  became 
an  adjective  meaning  '  shining,'  without  any  connexion  with  the 
geographical  orient,  as  in  Shakespeare,  Venus  981,  "an  orient 
drop  "  (a  tear),  and  ]\Iilton,  PL  i.  546,  "  Ten  thousand  banners 
rise  into  the  air.  With  orient  colours  waving." 

There  are  no  connecting  links  between  the  meanings  of  '  glad  ' 
and  '  obliged,'  '  forced,'  but  when  fain  came  to  be  chiefly  used 
in  combinations  like  '  he  was  fain  to  leave  the  country,'  it  was 
natm-al  for  the  younger  generation  to  interpret  the  whole  plu'ase 
as  implying  necessity  instead  of  gladness. 

We  have  similar  phenomena  in  certain  sjTitactical  changes. 
When  me  thinks  and  me  likes  gave  place  to  /  think  and  /  like,  the 
chief  cause  of  the  change  was  that  the  cliild  heard  combinations 
like  Mother  thinks  or  Father  likes,  where  mother  and  father  can 
be  either  nominative  or  accusative-dative,  and  the  construction 
is  thus  sjTitactically  ambiguous.  This  leads  to  a  '  shunting  '  of 
the  meaning  as  well  as  of  the  construction  of  the  verbs,  which  must 

^  Semantic  changes  through  ambiguous  syntactic  combinations  have 
recently  been  studied  espeeiallj'  by  Carl  Collin  ;  see  his  Semasioloffiska  stucUer, 
1906,  and  Le  Developpement  de  Sens  du  Suffixe  -ATA,  Lund,  1918,  ch.  iii 
and  iv,  Collin  there  treats  especially  of  tTie  transition  from  abstract  to 
concrete  nouns  ;  he  does  not,  as  I  have  done  above,  speak  of  the  role  of 
the  younger  generation  in  such  changes. 


176  THE   INFLUENCE   OF  THE  CHILD       [cii.  x 

have  come  about  in  a  new  brain  which  was  not  originally  acquainted 
with  the  old  construction. 

As  one  of  the  factors  bringing  about  changes  in  meaning  many 
scholars  mention  forgetfulness  ;  but  it  is  important  to  keep  in 
■view  that  what  happens  is  not  real  forgetting,  that  is,  snapping 
of  threads  of  thought  that  had  already  existed  within  the  same 
consciousness,  but  the  fact  that  the  new  individual  never  develops 
the  threads  of  thought  which  in  the  elder  generation  bound  one 
word  to  another.  Sometimes  there  is  no  connexion  of  ideas  in 
the  child's  bram  :  a  word  is  viewed  quite  singly  as  a  whole  and 
isolated,  till  later  perhaps  it  is  seen  in  its  etymological  relation. 
A  little  girl  of  six  asked  when  she  was  born.  "  You  were  born  on 
the  2nd  of  October."  "  Why,  then,  I  was  born  on  my  birthday  !  " 
she  cried,  her  eyes  beaming  with  joy  at  this  wonderfully  happy 
coincidence.  Origmally  Fare  well  was  only  said  to  some  one  going 
away.  If  noAv  the  departing  guest  says  Farewell  to  his  friend 
Avho  is  staying  at  home,  it  can  only  be  because  the  word  Farewell 
has  been  conceived  as  a  fixed  formula,  without  any  consciousness 
of  the  nieaning  of  its  parts. 

Sometimes,  on  the  other  hand,  new  connexions  of  thought 
arise,  as  when  we  associate  the  word  bound  with  bi7id  in  the  phrase 
'  he  is  bound  for  America.'  Our  ancestors  meant  '  he  is  ready  to 
go  '  (ON.  bui7in,  '  ready  '),  not  '  he  is  under  an  obligation  to  go.' 
The  establishment  of  new  associations  of  this  kind  seems  naturally 
to  take  place  at  the  moment  when  the  young  mind  makes 
acquaintance  with  the  word  :  the  phenomenon  is,  of  course,  closely 
related  to  "popular  etj-mology  "  (see  Ch.  VI  §6). 

X.— §4.  Differentiations. 

Linguistic  '  splittings  '  or  differentiations,  whereby  one  word 
becomes  two,  may  also  be  largely  due  to  the  trani^mission  of  the 
language  to  a  new  generation.  The  child  may  hear  two  pronuncia- 
tions of  the  same  word  from  different  people,  and  then  associate 
these  with  different  ideas.  Thus  Paul  Passy  learnt  the  word 
meule  in  the  sense  of  '  grindstone  '  from  his  father,  and  in  the 
sense  of  '  haycock  '  from  his  mother  ;  now  the  former  in  both 
senses  pronounced  [moel],  and  the  latter  in  both  [mol],  and  the 
child  thus  came  to  distinguish  [moel]  '  grindstone  '  and  rmDll 
'  haycock  '  (Ch  23).  ■' 

Or  the  child  may  have  learnt  the  word  at  two  different  periods 
of  its  life,  associated  with  different  spheres.  This,  I  take  it,  may 
be  the  reason  why  some  speakers  make  a  distinction  betAvecn 
two  pronunciations  of  the  word  medicine,  in  two  and  in  three 
syllables  :    they  take  [medsin],  but  study  [mcdisin]. 


§  4]  DIFFERENTIATIONS  177 

Finally,  the  cliild  can  itself  split  words.  A  friend  wiites  :  "  I 
remember  that  when  a  schoolboy  said  that  it  was  a  good  thing  that 
the  new  Headmaster  was  Dr.  Wood,  because  he  would  then  know 
when  boys  were  '  shamming,'  a  schoolfellow  remarked,  '  Wasn't 
it  funny  ?  He  did  not  know  the  difference  between  Doctor  and 
Docter.' "  In  Danish  the  Japanese  are  indiscriminately  called 
either  Japaneme  or  Japanesernc  ;  now,  I  once  overheard  my  bay 
(6. 10)  lecturing  his  playfellows  :  •'"  Japaneserne,  that  is  the  soldiers 
of  Japan,  but  Japaneme,  that  is  students  and  children  and  such- 
like." It  is,  of  course,  possible  that  he  may  have  heard'  one 
form  originally  when  showTi  some  pictiu-es  of  Japanese  soldiers, 
and  the  other  on  another  occasion,  and  that  this  may  have  been 
the  reason  for  his  distinction.  However  this  may  be,  I  do  not 
doubt  that  a  number  of  differentiations  of  words  are  to  be  ascribed 
to  the  transmission  of  the  language  to  a  new  generation.  Others 
may  have  arisen  in  the  speech  of  adults,  such  as  the  distinction 
between  off  and  of  (at  first  the  stressed  and  unstressed  form  of 
the  same  preposition),  or  between  tJiorough  and  through  (the  former 
is  still  used  as  a  preposition  in  Shakespeare  :  "  thorough  bush, 
thorough  brier  ").  But  complete  differentiation  is  not  established 
till  some  individuals  from  the  very  first  conceive  the  forms  as 
two  indej)endent  words. 

X.— §5.  Summary. 

Listead  of  saying,  as  previous  writers  on  these  questions  have 
done,  either  that  children  have  no  influence  or  that  they  have 
the  chief  influence  on  the  development  of  language,  it  will  be 
seen  that  I  have  divided  the  question  into  many,  going  through 
various  fields  of  linguistic  change  and  asking  in  each  what  may 
have  been  the  influence  of  the  child.  The  result  of  this  investigation 
has  been  that  there  are  certain  fields  in  which  it  is  both  impossible 
and  really  also  irrelevant  to  separate  the  share  of  the  child  and 
of  the  adult,  because  both  will  be  apt  to  introduce  changes  of  that 
kind  ;  such  are  assimilations  of  neighbouring  sounds  and  di'oppings 
of  consonants  in  groups.  Also,  with  regard  to  those  very  gradual 
shiftings  either  of  sound  or  of  meaning  in  which  it  is  natural 
to  assume  many  intermediate  stages  through  which  the  sound  or 
signification  must  have  passed  before  arriving  at  the  final 
result,  childi'en  and  adults  must  share  the  responsibility  for  the 
change.  Clippings  of  words  occur  in  the  s^Deech  of  both  classes, 
but  as  a  rule  adults  will  keep  the  beginning  of  a  word,  while  very 
small  children  will  perceive  or  remember  only  the  end  of  a  word 
and  use  that  for  the  whole.  But  finally  there  are  some  kinds  of 
changes  which  must  wholly  or  chiefly  be  charged  to  the  account 

12 


178  THE   INFLUENCE  OF  THE  CHILD        [ch.  x 

of  children  :  such  are  those  leaps  in  sound  or  signification  in  wliich 
intermediate  stages  are  out  of  the  question,  as  well  as  confusions 
of  similar  words  and  misdi visions  of  words,  and  the  most  violent 
differentiations  of  words. 

I  wish,  however,  here  to  insist  on  one  point  which  has,  I 
think,  become  more  and  more  clear  in  the  course  of  our  disquisition, 
namely,  that  we  ought  not  really  to  put  the  question  like  this  : 
Are  linguistic  changes  due  to  children  or  to  grown-up  people  ? 
The  important  distinction  is  not  really  one  of  age,  which  is  evidently 
one  of  degree  only,  but  that  between  the  first  learners  of  the  sound 
or  word  in  question  and  those  who  use  it  after  having  once  learnt 
it.  In  the  latter  case  we  have  mainly  to  do  with  infinitesimal 
glidings,  the  results  of  which,  when  summed  up  in  the  course  of 
long  periods  of  time,  may  be  very  considerable  indeed,  but  in 
which  it  will  always  be  possible  to  detect  intermediate  linLs 
connecting  the  extreme  points.  In  contrast  to  these  changes 
occurring  after  the  correct  (or  original)  form  has  been  acquired 
by  the  individual,  we  have  changes  occurring  simultuneously  with 
the  first  acquisition  of  the  word  or  form  in  question,  and  thus 
due  to  the  fact  of  its  transmission  to  a  new  generation,  or,  to 
speak  more  generally,  and,  indeed,  more  correctly,  to  new  indi- 
viduals. The  exact  age  of  the  learner  here  is  of  little  avail,  as  will 
be  seen  if  we  take  some  examples  of  metanal5'sis.  It  is  highly 
probable  that  the  first  users  of  forms  like  a  pea  or  a  cherry,  instead 
of  a  pease  and  a  cherries,  were  little  children  ;  but  a  Chinee  and 
a  Portuguee  are  not  necessarily,  or  not  pre-eminently,  children's 
words  :  on  the  other  hand,  it  is  to  me  indubitable  that  these  forms 
do  not  spring  into  existence  in  the  mind  of  someone  who  has 
previously  used  the  forms  Chinese  and  Portuguese  in  the  singular 
number,  but  must  be  due  to  the  fact  that  the  forms  the  Chinese 
and  the  Portuguese  (used  as  plurals)  have  been  at  once  apprehended 
as  made  up  of  Chinee,  Portuguee  -{-  the  plural  ending  -s  b}^  a 
person  hearing  them  for  the  first  time  ;  similarly  in  all  the  other 
cases.  We  shall  see  in  a  later  chapter  that  the  adoption  (on  the 
part  of  children  and  adults  alike)  of  sounds  and  words  from  a 
foreign  tongue  presents  certain  interesting  points  of  resemblance 
Avith  these  instances  of  change  :  in  both  cases  the  innovation 
begins  when  some  individual  is  first  made  acquainted  with 
linguistic  elements  that  are  new  to  him. 

X. — §  6.  Indirect  Influence. 

We  have  hitherto  considered  what  elements  of  the  language 
may  be  referred  to  a  child's  first  acquisition  of  language.  But 
we  have  not  yet   done    with   the  part   which   children   play  in 


§G]  INDIRECT   INFLUENCE  179 

linguistic  development.  There  are  two  things  which  must  be 
sharjily  distinguished  from  the  phenomena  discussed  in  the  pre- 
ceding chai)ter — the  first,  that  growii-up  people  in  many  cases 
catch  up  the  words  and  forms  used  by  children  and  thereby  give 
them  a  jiower  of  survival  which  they  would  not  have  otherwise  ; 
the  second,  that  grown-up  people  alter  their  own  language  so  as 
to  meet  children  half-way. 

As  for  the  first  point,  we  have  already  seen  examples  in  which 
mothers  and  nurses  have  found  the  baby's  forms  so  pretty  that 
they  have  adopted  them  themselves.  Generally  these  forms  are 
confined  to  the  family  circle,  but  they  may  under  favourable  circum- 
stances be  propagated  further.  A  special  case  of  the  highest 
interest  has  been  fully  discussed  in  the  section  about  words  of 
the  mamma-clsiss. 

As  for  the  second  point,  gro\vn-up  people  often  adapt  their 
speech  to  the  more  or  less  imaginary  needs  of  their  children  by 
pronouncing  words  as  they  do,  saying  dood  and  turn  for  '  good  '  and 
'  come,'  etc.  This  notion  clearly  depends  on  a  misunderstanding, 
and  can  only  retard  the  acquisition  of  the  right  pronunciation  ; 
the  child  understands  good  and  come  at  least  as  well,  if  not  better, 
and  the  consequence  may  be  that  when  he  is  able  himself  to  pro- 
nounce [g]  and  [k]  he  may  consider  it  immaterial,  because  one 
can  just  as  well  say  [d]  and  [t]  as  [g]  and  [k],  or  may  be  bewil- 
dered as  to  which  words  have  the  one  sound  and  which  the  other. 
It  can  only  be  a  benefit  to  the  child  if  all  who  come  in  contact 
with  it  speak  from  the  first  as  correctly,  elegantly  and  clearh^  as 
possible — not,  of  course,  in  long,  stilted  sentences  and  with  many 
learned  book-words,  but  naturally  and  easil}^  When  the  child 
makes  a  mistake,  the  most  effectual  way  of  correcting  it  is  certainly 
the  indirect  one  of  seeing  that  the  child,  soon  after  it  has  made 
the  mistake,  hears  the  correct  form.  If  he  says  '  A  waps  stinged 
me  '  :  answer,  '  It  stung  you  :  did  it  hurt  much  when  the  wasp 
stung  you  ?  '  etc.  No  special  emphasis  even  is  needed  ;  next 
time  he  will  probably  use  the  correct  form. 

But  many  parents  are  not  so  wise  ;  they  will  say  stinged  them- 
selves when  once  they  have  heard  the  child  say  so.  And  nurses 
and  others  have  even  developed  a  kind  of  artificial  nursery 
language  which  they  imagine  makes  matters  easier  for  the  little 
ones,  but  which  is  in  many  respects  due  to  erroneous  ideas  of  how 
children  ought  to  talk  rather  than  to  real  observation  of  the  way 
children  do  talk.  Many  forms  are  handed  over  traditionally  from 
one  nurse  to  another,  such  as  totties,  tootems  or  tootsies  for  '  feet ' 
(from  trotters  ?),  toothy -peg  for  '  tooth,'  tummy  or  t^imtum  for 
*  stomach,'  tootleums  for  '  babies,'  shooshoo  for  '  a  fly.'  I  give  a 
connected    specimen    of    this    nursery    language    (from    Egerton, 


180  THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  CHILD        [ch.  x 

Keynotes,  85) :  "  Didsum  was  denn  1  Oo  did !  Was  urns  de 
prettiest  itta  sweetums  denn  ?  Oo  was.  An'  did  um  put  'em  in 
a  nasty  shawl  an'  joggle  'em  in  an  ole  pufif-puff,  um  did,  was  a 
shame  !  Hitchy  cum,  hitchy  cum,  hitchy  cum  hi.  Chinaman  no 
likey  me."  This  reminds  one  of  pidgin-English,  and  in  a  later 
chapter  we  shall  see  that  that  and  similar  bastard  languages  are 
partly  due  to  the  same  mistaken  notion  that  it  is  necessary  to 
corrupt  one's  language  to  be  easily  understood  by  children  and 
inferior  races. 

Very  frequently  mothers  and  nurses  talk  to  children  in 
diminutives.  When  many  of  these  have  become  established  in 
ordinary  speech,  losing  their  force  as  diminutives  and  displacing 
the  proper  words,  this  is  another  result  of  nursery  language.  The 
phenomenon  is  widely  seen  in  Romance  languages,  where  auricula, 
Ft.  oreille,  It.  orecchio,  displaces  auris,  and  avicdlus,  Fr.  oiseau. 
It.  uccello,  displaces  avis  ;  we  may  remember  that  classical  Latin 
had  already  oculus,  for  '  eye.'  ^  It  is  the  same  in  Modern  Greek. 
An  example  of  the  same  tendency,  though  not  of  the  same  formal 
means  of  a  diminutive  ending,  is  seen  in  the  English  bird  (originally 
=  '  young  bird  ')  and  rabbit  (originally  =  '  j'oung  rabbit '),  which 
have  displaced  fowl  and  coney. 

A  very  remarkable  case  of  the  influence  of  nursery  language 
on  normal  speech  is  seen  in  many  coimtries,  viz.  in  the  displacing 
of  the  old  word  for  '  right '  (as  opposed  to  left).  The  distinction 
of  right  and  left  is  not  easy  for  small  children  :  some  children  in 
the  upper  classes  at  school  only  know  which  is  which  by  looking 
at  some  wart,  or  something  of  the  sort,  on  one  of  their  hands,  and 
have  to  think  every  time.  Meanwhile  mothers  and  nurses  will 
frequently  insist  on  the  use  of  the  right  (dextera)  hand,  and  when 
they  are  not  understood,  will  think  they  make  it  easier  for  the 
child  by  saying  '  No,  the  right  hand,'  and  so  it  comes  about  that 
in  many  languages  the  word  that  originally  means  '  correct '  is 
used  with  the  meaning  '  dexter.'  So  we  have  in  English  right, 
in  German  recht,  which  displaces  zeso,  Fr.  droit,  which  displaces 
desire ;  in  Spanish  also  la  derecha  has  begun  to  be  used  instead 
of  la  diestra ;  similarly,  in  Swedish  den  vackra  handen  instead 
of  hogra,  and  in  Jutlandish  dialects  den  kjon  hand  instead  of 
hojre. 

X.— §  7.  New  Languages. 

In  a  subsequent  chapter  (XIV  §  5)  we  shall  consider  the  theory 
that  epochs  in  which  the  changes  of  some  language  proceed  at  a 

*  I  know  perfectly  well  that  in  these  and  in  other  similar  words  there 
were  reasons  for  the  original  word  disappearing  as  unfit  (shortness,  possibility 
of  mistakes  through  similarity  with  other  words,  etc.).  What  interests 
me  here  is  the  fact  that  the  substitute  is  a  word  of  the  nursery. 


§7]  NEW  LANGUAGES  181 

more  rapid  pace  than  at  others  are  due  to  the  fact  that  in  times 
of  fierce,  widely  extended  wars  many  men  leave  home  and  remain 
abroad,  either  as  settlers  or  as  corpses,  while  the  women  left  behind 
have  to  do  the  field-work,  etc.,  and  neglect  their  homes,  the  conse- 
quence being  that  the  children  are  left  more  to  themselves,  and 
therefore  do  not  get  their  mistakes  in  speech  corrected  as  much 
as  usual. 

A  somewhat  related  idea  is  at  the  bottom  of  a  theory  advanced 
as  early  as  1886  by  the  American  ethnologist  Horatio  Hale  (see 
"The  Origin  of  Languages,"  in  the  American  Association  for  the 
Advancement  of  Science,  XXXV,  1886,  and  "The  Development  of 
Language,"  the  Canadian  Institute,  Toronto,  1888).  As  these 
papers  seem  to  have  been  entirely  unnoticed  by  leading  philolo- 
gists, I  shall  give  a  short  abstract  of  them,  leaving  out  what  appears 
to  me  to  be  erroneous  in  the  light  of  recent  linguistic  thought  and 
research,  namely,  his  application  of  the  theory  to  explain  the 
supposed  three  stages  of  linguistic  development,  the  monosyllabic, 
the  agglutinative  and  the  flexional. 

Hale  was  struck  with  the  fact  that  in  Oregon,  in  a  region  not 
much  larger  than  France,  we  find  at  least  thirty  different  families 
of  languages  living  together.  It  is  impossible  to  believe  that 
thirty  separate  communities  of  speechless  precursors  of  man  should 
have  begun  to  talk  independently  of  one  another  in  thirty  distinct 
languages  in  this  district.  Hale  therefore  concludes  that  the 
origin  of  linguistic  stocks  is  to  be  found  in  the  language-making 
instinct  of  very  young  children.  When  two  children  who  are 
just  beginning  to  speak  are  thrown  much  together,  they  sometimes 
invent  a  complete  language,  sufficient  for  all  purposes  of  mutual 
intercourse,  and  yet  totally  unintelligible  to  their  parents.  In 
an  ordinary  household,  the  conditions  under  which  such  a  language 
v/ould  be  formed  are  most  likely  to  occur  in  the  case  of  twins, 
and  Hale  now  proceeds  to  mention  those  instances — five  in  all — 
that  he  has  come  across  of  languages  framed  in  this  manner  by 
young  children.  He  concludes  :  "It  becomes  evident  that,  to 
ensure  the  creation  of  a  speech  which  shall  be  a  parent  of  a  new 
language  stock,  all  that  is  needed  is  that  two  or  more  young  children 
should  be  placed  by  themselves  in  a  condition  where  they  will  be 
entirely,  or  in  a  large  degree,  free  from  the  presence  and  influence 
of  their  elders.  They  must,  of  course,  continue  in  this  condition 
long  enough  to  grow  up,  to  form  a  household,  and  to  have 
descendants  to  whom  they  can  communicate  their  new  speech." 

These  conditions  he  finds  among  the  hunting  tribes  of  America, 
in  which  it  is  common  for  single  families  to  wander  off  from  the 
main  band.  "  In  modern  times,  when  the  whole  country  is  occu- 
pied, their  flight  would  merely  carry  them  into  the  territory  of 


182  THE   INFLUENCE  OF  THE   CHILD        [cii.  x 

another  tribe,  among  whom,  if  well  received,  they  would  quickly 
be  absorbed.  But  in  the  primitive  period,  when  a  vast  uninhabited 
region  stretched  before  them,  it  would  be  easy  for  them  to  find 
some  sheltered  nook  or  fruitful  valley.  ...  If  under  such  circum- 
stances disease  or  the  casualties  of  a  hunter's  life  should  carry 
off  the  parents,  the  survival  of  the  children  would,  it  is  evident, 
depend  mainly  upon  the  nature  of  the  climate  and  the  ease  with 
which  food  could  be  procured  at  all  seasons  of  the  year.  In 
ancient  Europe,  after  the  present  climatal  conditions  were  estab- 
lished, it  is  doubtful  if  a  family  of  children  under  ten  years  of 
age  could  have  lived  through  a  single  winter.  We  are  not, 
therefore,  surprised  to  find  that  no  more  than  four  or  five  language 
stocks  are  represented  in  Europe.  ...  Of  Northern  America, 
east  of  the  Rocky  Mountains  and  north  of  the  tropics,  the  same 
may  be  said.  .  .  .  But  there  is  one  region  where  Nature  seems 
to  offer  herself  as  the  willing  nurse  and  bountiful  stepmother 
of  the  feeble  and  unprotected  .  .  .  California.  Its  wonderful 
climate  (follows  a  long  description).  .  .  .  Need  we  wonder  that, 
in  such  a  mild  and  fruitful  region,  a  great  number  of  separate 
tribes  were  found,  speaking  languages  which  a  careful  investigation 
has  classed  in  nineteen  distinct  linguistic  stocks  ?  "  In  Oregon, 
and  in  the  interior  of  Brazil,  Hale  finds  similar  climatic  conditions 
with  the  same  result,  a  great  number  of  totally  dissimilar  lan- 
guages, while  in  Australia,  whose  climate  is  as  mild  as  that  of 
any  of  these  regions,  we  find  hundreds,  perhaps  thousands,  of 
petty  tribes,  as  completely  isolated  as  those  of  South  America, 
but  all  speaking  languages  of  the  same  stock — because  "the  other 
conditions  are  such  as  would  make  it  impossible  for  an  isolated 
group  of  young  children  to  sm*vive.  The  whole  of  Australia 
is  subject  to  severe  droughts,  and  is  so  scantily  provided  with 
edible  products  that  the  aborigines  are  often  reduced  to  the 
greatest  straits." 

This,  then,  is  Hale's  theory.  Let  us  now  look  a  little  closer 
into  the  proofs  adduced.  They  are,  as  it  will  be  seen,  of  a  twofold 
order.  He  invokes  the  language-creating  tendencies  of  young 
childi-en  on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other  the  geographical 
distribution  of  linguistic  stocks  or  genera. 

As  to  the  first,  it  is  true  that  so  competent  a  psychologist  as 
Wundt  denies  the  possibility  in  very  strong  terms.^  But  facts 
certainly  do  not  justify  this  foregone  conclusion.  I  must  first 
refer  the  reader  to  Hale's  own  report  of  the  five  instances  known 

^  "  Einige  namentlich  in  der  altern  litteratiir  vorkommende  angaben 
iiber  kinder,  die  sich  zusammen  aufwachsend  eine  eigene  sprache  gebildet 
liaben  sollen,  sind  wohl  ein  fiir  allemal  in  das  gebiet  der  fabel  zu  verweisen  " 
(S  1.  286). 


§7]  NEW   LANGUAGES  188 

to  him.  Unfortunately,  the  linguistic  material  collected  by  him 
is  so  scanty  that  we  can  form  only  a  very  imperfect  idea  of  the 
languages  which  he  says  children  have  developed  and  of  the 
relation  between  them  and  the  language  of  the  parents.  But 
otherwise  his  report  is  very  instructive,  and  I  shall  call  special 
attention  to  the  fact  that  in  most  cases  the  children  seem  to  have 
been  '  spoilt '  by  their  parents  ;  this  is  also  the  case  with  regard 
to  one  of  the  families,  though  it  does  not  appear  from  Hale's 
own  extracts  from  the  book  in  which  he  found  his  facts  (G. 
Watson,  Universe  of  Language,  N.Y.,  1878). 

The  only  word  recorded  in  this  case  is  nl-si-boo-a  for  '  car- 
riage '  ;  how  that  came  into  existence,  I  dare  not  conjecture  ; 
but  when  it  is  said  that  the  syllables  of  it  were  sometimes  so 
repeated  that  they  made  a  much  longer  word,  this  agrees  very 
well  with  what  I  have  myself  observed  with  regard  to  ordinary 
children's  playful  word-coinages.  In  the  next  case,  described  by 
E.  R.  Hun,  M.D.,  of  Albany,  more  words  are  given.  Some  of 
these  bear  a  strong  resemblance  to  French,  although  neither  the 
parents  nor  servants  spoke  that  language  ;  and  Hale  thinks  that 
some  person  may  have  "  amused  herself,  innocently  enough,  by 
teaching  the  child  a  few  words  of  that  tongue."  This,  however, 
does  not  seem  necessary  to  explain  the  words  recorded.  Feu, 
pronounced,  we  are  told,  like  the  French  word,  signified  '  fire, 
light,  cigar,  sun  '  :  it  may  be  either  E.  fire  or  else  an  imitation  of 
the  sound /^  without  a  vowel,  or  [fa']  used  in  blowing  out  a  candle 
or  a  match  or  in  smoking,  so  as  to  amuse  the  child,  exactly  as 
in  the  case  of  one  of  my  little  Danish  friends,  who  used  Jff  as  the 
name  for  '  smoke,  steam,'  and  later  for  '  funnel,  chimney,'  and 
finally  anything  standing  upright  against  the  sky,  for  instance, 
a  flagstaff.  Petee-petee,  the  name  which  the  Albany  girl  gave  to 
her  brother,  and  which  Dr.  Hun  derived  from  F.  petit,  may  be 
just  as  well  from  E.  pet  or  petty  ;  and  to  explain  her  word  for 
'  I,'  ma,  we  need  not  go  to  F,  moi,  as  E.  me  or  my  may  obviously 
be  thus  distorted  by  an j'  child.  Her  word  for  'not'  is  said  to 
have  been  ne-pas,  though  the  exact  pronunciation  is  not  given. 
This  cannot  have  been  taken  from  the  French,  at  any  rate  not 
from  real  French,  as  ne  and  pas  are  here  separated,  and  ne  is  more 
often  than  not  pronounced  without  the  vowel  or  omitted  altogether  ; 
the  girl's  word,  if  pronounced  something  like  ['nepa*]  may  be 
nothing  else  than  an  imperfect  childish  pronunciation  of  never, 
cf.  the  negroes'  form  nebher.  Too,  '  all,  everj^thing,'  of  course 
resembles  Fr.  tout,  but  how  should  anj'one  have  been  able  to  teach 
this  girl,  who  did  not  speak  any  intelligible  language,  a  French 
word  of  this  abstract  character  ?  Some  of  the  other  words  admit 
of  a  natural  explanation  from  English  :  go-go,  '  delicacy,  as  sugar, 


184  THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  CHILD        [ch.  x 

candy  or  dessert,'  is  probably  goody-goody,  or  a  reduplicated  form 
of  good ;  deer,  '  money,'  may  be  from  dear,  '  expensive  ' ;  odo, 
'  to  send  for,  to  go  out,  to  take  away,'  is  evidently  out,  as  in  ma 
odo,  '  I  want  to  go  out '  ;  gaan,  '  God,'  must  be  the  English  word, 
in  spite  of  the  difference  in  pronunication,  for  the  child  would  never 
think  of  inventing  this  idea  on  its  own  accord  ;  pa-7na,  '  to  go  to 
sleep,  pillow,  bed,'  is  from  by-bye  or  an  independent  word  of  the 
wamwa-class  ;  7nea,  '  cat,  fur,'  of  course  is  imitative  of  the  sound 
of  the  cat.  For  the  rest  of  the  words  I  have  no  conjectiues  to 
offer.  Some  of  the  derived  meanings  are  curious,  though  perhaps 
not  more  startling  than  many  found  in  the  speech  of  ordinary 
children  ;  pajM  and  mamma  separately  had  their  usual  signification, 
but  papa-mamma  meant  '  church,  prayer-book,  cross,  priest '  : 
the  parents  were  punctual  in  church  observances ;  gar  odo, 
'  horse  out,  to  send  for  the  horse,'  came  to  mean  '  pencil  and 
paper,'  as  the  father  used,  when  the  carriage  was  wanted,  to  write 
an  order  and  send  it  to  the  stable.  In  the  remaining  three  cases 
of  '  invented  '  languages  no  specimens  are  given,  except  shindikik, 
'  cat.'  In  all  cases  the  children  seem  to  have  talked  together 
fluently  when  by  themselves  in  their  own  gibberish. 

But  there  exists  on  record  a  case  better  elucidated  than  Hale's 
five  cases,  namely  that  of  the  Icelandic  girl  Saeunn.  (See  Jonasson 
and  Eschricht  in  Dansh  Maanedsskrift,  Copenhagen,  1858.)  She 
was  born  in  the  beginning  of  the  last  century  on  a  farm  in 
Hiinavatns-syssel  in  the  northern  part  of  Iceland,  and  began  early 
to  converse  with  her  twin  brother  in  a  language  that  was  entirely 
unintelligible  to  their  surroundings.  Her  parents  were  disquieted, 
and  therefore  resolved  to  send  away  the  brother,  who  died  soon 
afterwards.  They  now  tried  to  teach  the  girl  Icelandic,  but 
soon  (too  soon,  evidently  !)  came  to  the  conclusion  that  she  could 
not  learn  it,  and  then  they  were  foolish  enough  to  learn  her 
language,  as  did  also  her  brothers  and  sisters  and  even  some  of 
their  friends.  In  order  that  she  might  be  confirmed,  her  elder 
brother  translated  the  catechism  and  acted  as  interpreter  between 
the  parson  and  the  girl.  She  is  described  as  intelligent — she 
even  composed  poetry  in  her  own  language — but  shy  and  dis- 
trustful. Jonasson  gives  a  few  specimens  of  her  language,  some 
of  which  Eschricht  succeeds  in  interpreting  as  based  on  Icelandic 
words,  though  strangely  disfigured.  The  language  to  Jonasson, 
who  had  heard  it,  seemed  totally  dissimilar  to  Icelandic  in  sounds 
and  construction ;  it  had  no  flexions,  and  lacked  pronouns. 
The  vocabulary  was  so  limited  that  she  very  often  had  to  supple- 
ment a  phrase  by  means  of  nods  or  gestures  ;  and  it  was  difficult 
to  carry  on  a  conversation  with  her  in  the  dark.  The  ingenuity 
of  some  of  the  compounds  and  metaphors  is  greatly  admired  by 


§7]  NEW  LANGUAGES  185 

Jonasson,  though  to  the  more  sober  mind  of  Eschricht  they  appear 
rather  childish  or  primitive,  as  when  a  '  wether  '  is  called  mepok-ill 
from  ine  (imitation  of  the  sound)  +  pok,  '  a  little  bag '  (Icel. 
poki)  4"  itt,  '  to  cut.'  The  only  complete  sentence  recorded  is 
'  Dirfa  offo  nonona  uhuh,'  which  means :  '  Sigurdur  gets  up 
extremely  late.'  In  his  analysis  of  the  whole  case  Eschricht 
succeeds  in  stripping  it  of  the  mystical  glamour  in  which  it  evidently 
appeared  to  Jonasson  as  well  as  to  the  girl's  relatives  ;  he  is 
undoubtedly  right  in  maintaining  that  if  the  parents  had  persisted 
in  only  talking  Icelandic  to  her,  she  would  soon  have  forgotten 
her  own  language  ;  he  compares  her  words  with  some  strange 
disfigurements  of  Danish  which  he  had  observed  among  children 
in  his  own  family  and  acquaintanceship. 

I  read  this  report  a  good  many  years  ago,  and  afterwards  I 
tried  on  two  occasions  to  obtain  precise  information  about  similar 
cases  I  had  seen  mentioned,  one  in  Halland  (Sweden)  and  the 
other  in  Finland,  but  without  success.  But  in  1903,  when  I  was 
lecturmg  on  the  language  of  children  in  the  University  of  CoiDcn- 
hagen,  I  had  the  good  fortune  to  hear  of  a  case  not  far  from 
Copenhagen  of  two  children  speaking  a  language  of  their  own. 
I  investigated  the  case  as  well  as  I  could,  by  seeing  and  hearing 
them  several  times  and  thus  checking  the  words  and  sentences 
which  their  teacher,  who  was  constantly  with  them,  kindly  took 
down  in  accordance  with  my  directions.  I  am  thus  enabled  to 
give  a  fairly  full  account  of  their  language,  though  unfortunately 
my  investigation  was  interrupted  by  a  long  voyage  in  1904. 

The  boys  were  twins,  about  five  and  a  half  years  old  when  I 
saw  them,  and  so  alike  that  even  the  people  who  were  about  them 
every  day  had  difficulty  in  distinguishing  them  from  each  other. 
Their  mother  (a  single  woman)  neglected  them  shamefully  when 
they  were  quite  small,  and  they  were  left  very  much  to  shift  for 
themselves.  For  a  long  time,  while  their  mother  was  ill  in  a 
hospital,  they  lived  in  an  out-of-the-way  place  with  an  old  woman, 
who  is  said  to  have  been  very  deaf,  and  who  at  any  rate  troubled 
herself  very  little  about  them.  When  they  were  four  years  old, 
the  parish  authorities  discovered  how  sadly  neglected  they  were 
and  that  they  spoke  quite  unintelHgibly,  and  therefore  sent  them 
to  a  '  children's  home '  in  Seeland,  where  they  were  properly 
taken  care  of.  At  first  they  were  extremely  shy  and  reticent, 
and  it  was  a  long  time  before  they  felt  at  home  with  the  other 
children.  When  I  first  saw  them,  they  had  in  so  far  learnt  the 
ordinary  language  that  they  were  able  to  understand  many  every- 
day sentences  spoken  to  them,  and  could  do  what  they  were 
told  (e.g.  '  Take  the  footstool  and  put  it  in  my  room  near  the 
stove  '),  but  they  could  not  speak  Danish  and  said  very  little 


18G  THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  CHILD        [en.  x 

in  the  presence  of  anybody  else.  When  they  were  b}'  themselves 
they  conversed  pretty  freely  and  in  a  completely  unintelligible 
gibberish,  as  I  had  the  opportunity  to  convince  myself  when 
standing  behind  a  door  one  day  when  they  thought  they  were 
not  observed.  Afterwards  I  got  to  be  in  a  way  good  friends  with 
them — they  called  me  pij-ma,  py  being  their  word  for  'smoke, 
smoking,  pipe,  cigar,'  so  that  I  got  my  name  from  the  chocolate 
cigars  which  I  used  to  ingratiate  myself  with  them — and  then  I 
got  them  to  repeat  words  and  jjhrases  which  their  teacher  had 
written  out  for  me,  and  thus  was  enabled  to  write  down  everything 
phonetically. 

An  analysis  of  the  sounds  occurring  in  their  words  showed 
me  that  their  vocal  organs  were  perfectly  normal.  Most  of  the 
words  were  evidently  Danish  words,  however  much  distorted  and 
shortened  ;  a  voiceless  I,  which  does  not  occur  in  Danish,  and 
which  I  write  here  Ih,  was  a  very  frequent  sound.  This,  combined 
with  an  inclination  to  make  many  words  end  in  -jp,  was  enough 
to  disguise  words  very  eftectuall}^  as  when  sort  (black)  was  made 
Ihop.  I  shall  give  the  children's  pronunciations  of  the  names  of 
some  of  their  new  playfellows,  adding  in  brackets  the  Danish 
substratum  :  lliep  (Svend),  Ihip  (Vilhelm),  lip  (Elisabeth),  lop 
(Charlotte),  hap  (Mandse)  ;  similarly  the  doctor  was  called  dop. 
In  many  cases  there  was  phonetic  assimilation  at  a  distance,  as 
when  milk  (mselk)  was  called  be.p,  flower  (blomst)  bop,  light  (lys) 
Ihtjlh,  sugar  (sukker)  Iholh,  cold  (kulde)  Ihulh,  sometimes  also  idh, 
bed  (seng)  scejs,  fish  (fisk)  se-is. 

I  subjoin  a  few  complete  sentences  :  nina  enaj  una  enaj  hceva 
mad  enaj,  '  we  shall  not  fetch  food  for  the  young  rabbits  ' :  nina 
rabbit  (kanin),  enaj  negation  (nej,  no),  repeated  several  times  in 
each  negative  sentence,  as  in  Old  English  and  in  Bantu  languages, 
una  young  (unge).  Bap  ep  dop),  '  Mandse  has  broken  the  hobby- 
horse,' literally  '  Mandse  horse  piece.'  Hos  ia  bov  Ihalh,  '  brother's 
trousers  are  wet,  Maria,'  literally  '  trousers  Maria  brother  water.' 
The  words  are  put  together  without  any  flexions,  and  the  word 
order  is  totally  different  from  that  of  Danish. 

Only  in  one  case  was  I  unable  to  identify  words  that  I  under- 
stood either  as  '  little  language  '  forms  of  Danish  words  or  else 
as  soimd-imitations ;  but  then  it  must  be  remembered  that  they 
spoke  a  good  deal  that  neither  I  nor  any  of  the  people  about  them 
could  make  anything  of.  And  then,  unfortunately,  when  I  began 
to  study  it,  their  language  was  already  to  a  great  extent  '  human- 
ized '  in  comparison  to  what  it  was  when  they  first  came  to  the 
children's  home.  In  fact,  I  noticed  a  constant  progress  during 
the  short  time  I  observed  the  boys,  and  in  some  of  the  last 
sentences  I  have  noted,  I  even  find  the  genitive  case  employed. 


§7]  NEW    LANGUAGES  187 

The  idiom  of  these  twins  cannot,  of  course,  be  called  an  inde- 
pendent, still  less  a  complete  or  fully  developed  language ;  but 
if  they  were  able  to  produce  something  so  different  from  the 
language  spoken  around  them  at  the  beginning  of  the  twentieth 
century  and  in  a  civilized  country,  there  can  to  my  mind  be  no 
doubt  that  Hale  is  right  in  his  contention  that  children  left  to 
themselves  even  more  than  these  were,  in  an  uninhabited  region 
where  they  were  still  not  liable  to  die  from  hunger  or  cold,  would 
be  able  to  develop  a  language  for  their  mutual  understanding 
that  might  become  so  different  from  that  of  their  parents  as  really 
to  constitute  a  new  stock  of  language.  So  that  we  can  now  pass 
to  the  other — geographical — side  of  what  Hale  advances  in  favour 
of  his  theory. 

So  far  as  I  can  see,  the  facts  here  tally  very  well  with  the 
theory.  Take,  on  the  one  hand,  the  Eskimo  languages,  spoken 
with  astonishingly  little  variation  from  the  east  coast  of  Greenland 
to  Alaska,  an  immense  stretch  of  territory  in  which  small  children 
if  left  to  themselves  would  be  sure  to  die  very  soon  indeed.  Or 
take  the  Finnish-Ugrian  languages  in  the  other  hemisphere,  exhibit- 
ing a  similar  close  relationship,  though  spread  over  wide  areas. 
And  then,  on  the  other  hand,  the  American  languages  already 
adduced  by  Hale.  I  do  not  pretend  to  any  deeper  knowledge  of 
these  languages  ;  but  from  the  most  recent  works  of  very  able 
specialists  I  gather  an  impression  of  the  utmost  variety  in 
phonetics,  in  grammatical  structure  and  in  vocabulary ;  see 
especially  Roland  B.  Dixon  and  Alfred  L.  Kroeber,  "  The  Native 
Languages  of  California,"  in  the  American  AntJirojJologisf,  1903. 
Even  where  recent  research  seems  to  establish  some  kind  of  kinship 
between  families  hitherto  considered  as  distinguished  stocks  (as 
in  Dixon's  interesting  paper,  "  Linguistic  Relationships  within  the 
Shasta -Achoraawi  Stock,"  XV  Congi-es  des  Americanistes,  1906) 
the  similarities  are  still  so  incomplete,  so  capricious  and  generally 
so  remote  that  they  seem  to  support  Hale's  explanation  rather 
than  a  gradual  splitting  of  the  usual  kind. 

As  for  Brazil,  I  shall  quote  some  interesting  remarks  from 
C.  F.  P.  V.  Martins,  Beitrdge  zur  Ethnographie  u.  Sprachenkunde 
Amerika's,  1867,  i.  p.  46  :  "  In  Brazil  we  see  a  scant  and  unevenly 
distributed  native  population,  uniform  in  bodily  structure,  tempera- 
ment, customs  and  manner  of  living  generally,  but  presenting  a 
really  astonishing  diversity  in  language.  A  language  is  often 
confined  to  a  few  mutually  related  individuals  ;  it  is  in  truth  a 
family  heirloom  and  isolates  its  speakers  from  all  other  people 
so  as  to  render  any  attempt  at  understanding  impossible.  On 
the  vessel  in  which  we  travelled  up  the  rivers  in  the  interior  of 
Brazil,  we  often,  among  twenty  Indian  rowers,  could  count  only 


188  THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  CHILD       [ch.  x 

three  or  four  that  were  at  all  able  to  speak  together  .  .  .  they 
sat  there  side  by  side  dumb  and  stupid." 

Hale's  theory  is  worthy,  then,  of  consideration,  and  now,  at 
the  close  of  our  voyage  round  the  world  of  children's  language, 
we  have  gained  a  post  of  vantage  from  which  we  can  overlook 
the  whole  globe  and  see  that  the  peculiar  word-forms  which  children 
use  in  their  '  little  language  '  period  can  actually  throw  light 
on  the  distribution  of  languages  and  groups  of  languages  over 
the  great  continents.     Yes, 

Scorn  not  the  little  ones  !     You  oft  will  find 
They  reach  the  goal,  when  great  ones  lag  behind. 


BOOK   III 
THE    INDIVIDUAL    AND    THE    WORLD 


CHAPTER  XI 
THE   FOREIGNER 

§  1.  The  Substratum  Theory.  §  2.  French  u  and  Spanish  h.  §  3.  Gothonic 
and  Keltic.  §  4.  Etruscan  and  Indian  Consonants.  §  5.  Gothonic 
Sound-shift.  §  6.  Natural  and  Specific  Changes.  §  7.  Power  of 
Substratum.  §  8.  Types  of  Race-mixture.  §  9.  Summary.  §  10. 
General  Theory  of  Loan-words.  §  11.  Classes  of  Loan-words. 
§  12.  Influence  on  Grammar.     §  13.  Translation-loans. 

XI.— §  1.  The  Substratum  Theory. 

It  seems  evident  that  if  we  wish  to  find  out  the  causes  of  linguistic 
change,  a  fundamental  division  must  be  into — 

(1)  Changes  that  are  due  to  the  transference  of  the  language 
to  new  individuals,  and 

(2)  Changes  that  are  independent  of  such  transference. 

It  may  not  be  easy  in  practice  to  distinguish  the  two  classes, 
as  the  very  essence  of  the  linguistic  life  of  each  individual  is  a 
continual  give-and-take  between  him  and  those  around  him ; 
still,  the  division  is  in  the  main  clear,  and  will  consequently  be 
followed  in  the  present  work. 

The  first  class  falls  again  naturally  into  two  heads,  according 
as  the  new  individual  does  not,  or  does  already,  possess  a  language. 
With  the  former,  i.e.  with  the  native  child  learning  his  '  mother- 
tongue,'  we  have  dealt  at  length  in  Book  II,  and  we  now  proceed  to 
an  examination  of  the  influence  exercised  on  a  language  through  its 
transference  to  individuals  w^ho  are  already  in  possession  of  another 
language — let  us,  for  the  sake  of  shortness,  call  them  foreigners. 

While  some  earlier  scholars  denied  categorically  the  existence 
of  mixed  languages,  recent  investigators  have  attached  a  very 
great  importance  to  mixtui'cs  of  languages,  and  have  studied 
actually  occurring  mixtures  of  various  degrees  and  characters 
with  the  greatest  accuracy  :  I  mention  here  only  one  name,  that 
of  Hugo  Schuchardt,  who  combines  profundity  and  width  of 
knowledge  with  a  truly  philosophical  spirit,  though  the  form  of 
his  numerous  scattered  writings  makes  it  difficult  to  gather  a  just 
idea  of  his  views  on  many  questions. 

Many  scholars  have  recently  attached  great  importance  to  the 
subtler  and  more  hidden  influence  exerted  by  one  language  on 
another  in  those  cases  in  which  a  population  abandons  its  original 

191 


192  THE  FOREIGNER  [ch.  xi 

language  and  adopts  that  of  another  race,  generally  in  consequence 
of  military  conquest.  In  these  cases  the  theorj'^  is  that  people 
keep  many  of  their  speech-habits,  especially  with  regard  to  articula- 
tion and  accent,  even  while  using  the  vocabulary,  etc.,  of  the  new 
language,  which  thus  to  a  large  extent  is  tinged  by  the  old  language. 
There  is  thus  created  what  is  now  generally  termed  a  substratvm 
underlying  the  new  language.  As  the  original  substratum  modify- 
ing a  language  which  gradually  spreads  over  a  large  area  varies 
according  to  the  character  of  the  tribes  subjugated  in  different 
districts,  this  would  account  for  many  of  those  splittings-up  of 
languages  which  we  witness  everywhere. 

Hirt  goes  so  far  as  to  think  it  possible  by  the  help  of  exist- 
ing dialect  boundaries  to  determine  the  extensions  of  aboriginal 
languages  (Idg  19). 

There  is  certainl}'  something  very  plausible  in  this  manner  of 
viewing  linguistic  changes,  for  we  all  know  from  practical  everyday 
experience  that  the  average  foreigner  is  apt  to  betray  his  nation- 
ality as  soon  as  he  opens  his  mouth  :  the  Italian's  or  the  German's 
English  is  just  as  different  from  the  'real  thing'  as,  inverselj%  the 
Englishman's  Italian  or  German  is  difl^erent  from  the  Italian  or 
German  of  a  native  :  the  place  of  articulation,  especially  that  of 
the  tongue-tip  consonants,  the  aspiration  or  want  of  aspiration 
of  p,  t,  k,  the  voicing  or  non-voicing  of  b,  d,  g,  the  diphthongization 
or  monophthongization  of  long  vowels,  the  syllabification,  various 
peculiarities  in  quantity  and  in  tone-movements — all  such  things 
are  apt  to  colour  the  whole  acoustic  impression  of  a  foreigner's 
speech  in  an  acquired  language,  and  it  is,  of  course,  a  natural 
supposition  that  the  aboriginal  inhabitants  of  Europe  and  Asia 
were  just  as  liable  to  transfer  their  speech  habits  to  new  languages 
as  their  descendants  are  nowadays.  There  is  thus  a  priori  a  strong 
probability  that  linguistic  substrata  have  exercised  some  influence 
on  the  development  of  conquering  languages.  But  when  we 
proceed  to  apply  this  natural  inference  to  concrete  examples  of 
linguistic  history,  we  shall  see  that  the  theory  does  not  perhaps 
suffice  to  explain  everything  that  its  advocates  would  have  it 
explain,  and  that  there  are  certain  difficulties  which  have  not 
always  been  faced  or  ajspraised  according  to  their  real  value.  A 
consideration  of  these  concrete  examples  will  naturally  lead  up  to 
a  discussion  of  the  general  principles  involved  in  the  substratum 
theory. 

XI.— §  2.  French  u  and  Spanish  h. 

First  I  shall  mention  Ascoli's  famous  theory  that  French  [y] 
for  Latin  u,  as  in  dur,  etc.,  is  due  to  Gallic  influence,  cf.  Welsh 
i  in  din  from  dun,  which  presupposes  a  transition  from  u  to  [y]. 


§2]  FRENCH    U   AND    SPANISH   H  198 

Ascoli  found  a  proof  in  the  fact  that  Dutch  also  has  the  pronuncia- 
tion [y],  e.g.  in  duur,  on  the  old  Keltic  soil  of  the  Belgie,  to  which 
Schuchardt  (SID  126)  added  his  observation  of   [y]  in  dialectal 
South  German  (Breisgau),  in  a  district  in  which  there  had  formerly 
been  a  strong  Keltic  element.    This  looks   very  convincing  at 
first  blush.     On  closer  inspection,  doubts  arise  on  many  points. 
The  French  transition  cannot  with  certainty  be  dated  very  early, 
for  then  c  in  cure  would  have  been  palatalized  and  changed  as 
c  before   i  (Lenz,  KZ  39.  46) ;    also  the  treatment  of  the  vowel 
in  French  words  taken  over  into  English,  where  it  is  not  identified 
with  the  native  [y],  but  becomes  [iu],  is  best  explained  on  the  as- 
sumption that  about  1200  a.d.  the  sound  had  not  advanced  farther 
on  its  march  towards  the  front  position  than,  say,  the  Swedish 
'  mixed-round  '  sound  in  hus.    The  district  in  which  [y]  is  foimd 
for  u  is  not  coextensive  with  the  Keltic  possessions ;    there  were 
very  few  Kelts  in  what  is  now  Holland,  and  inversely  South  German 
[y]  for  u  does  not  cover  the  whole  Keltic  domain ;    [y]  is  found 
outside  the  French  territory  proper,  namely,  in  Franco-Proven9al 
(where  the  substratum  was  Ligurian)  and  in  Proven9al  (where  there 
were  very  few  Galli ;    cf.  Wechssler,  L  113).    Thus  the  province 
of  [y]  is  here  too  small  and  there  too  large  to  make  the  argument 
conclusive.     Even   more  fatal  is  the  objection   that  the   Gallic 
transition  from  u  to  y  is  very  uncertain  (Pedersen,  GKS  1.  §  353). 
So  much  is  certain,  that  the  fronting  of  u  was  not  a  common  Keltic 
transition,  for  it  is  not  found  in  the  Gaelic  (Goidelic)  branch.^ 
On  the  other  hand,  the  transition  from  [u]  to  [y]  occurs  elsewhere, 
independent  of  Keltic  influence,  as  in  Old  Greek  (cf .  also  the  Swedish 
sound  in  hus)  :   wli}''  cannot  it,  then,  be  independent  in  French  ? 
Another  case  adduced  by  Ascoli  is  initial  h  instead  of  Latin 
/  in  the  country  anciently  occupied  by  the  Iberians.    Now,  Basque 
has  no  /  sound  at  all  in  any  connexion  ;  if  the  same  aversion  to 
/had  been  the  cause  of  the  Spanish  substitution  of  h  for/,  we  should 
expect  the  substitution  to  have  been  made  from  the  moment  when 
Latin  was  first  spoken  in  Hispania,  and  we  should  expect  it  to  be 
found   in    all   positions  and  connexions.     But  what  do  we  find 
instead  ?     First,  that  Old  Spanish  had  /  in  many  cases  where  modern 
Spanish  has  h   (i.e.  really  no  sound  at  all),  and  this  cannot  be 

^  Cf.  against  the  assumption  of  Keltic  influence  in  this  instance  Meyer* 
Liibke,  Die  Romanischen  Sprachen,  Kultur  der  Gegenwart,  p.  457,  and  Ett- 
majer  in  Streit  berg's  Gesch.  2.  265.  H.  Mutschmanu,  Phonology  of  the  North- 
Eastern  Scotch  Dialect,  1909,  p.  53,  thinks  that  the  fronting  of  tt  in  Scotch 
is  similar  to  that  of  Latin  u  on  GaUic  territory,  and  like  it  is  ascribable  to 
the  Keltic  inhabitants  :  he  forgets,  however,  that  the  corresponding  fronting 
is  not  found  in  the  Keltic  spoken  in  Scotland.  Moreover,  the  complicated 
Scotch  phenomena  cannot  be  compared  with  the  French  transition,  for 
the  sound  of  [u]  remains  in  many  cases,  and  [i]  generally  corresponds  to 
earlier  [o],  whatever  the  explanation  may  be. 

13 


194  THE  FOREIGNER  [ch.  xi 

altogether  ascribed  to  '  Latinizing  scribes.'    On  the  contrary,  the 
transition  f  >h  seems  to  have  taken  place  many  centuiics  after  the 
Roman  invasion,   since  the  Spanish-speaking  Jews   of   Salonika, 
who  emigrated  from  Spain  about  1500,  have  to  this  day  preserved 
the  /  sound  among  other  archaic  traits  (see  F.  Hanssen,  Span. 
Gramm.  45 ;  Wiener,  Modern  Philology,  June  1903,  p.  205).     And 
secondly,  that  /  has  been  kept  in  certain  connexions  ;  thus,  before 
[w],  as  in  fui,fuiste,  fue,  etc.,  before  r  and  I,  as  in  fnito,  flor,  etc. 
This  certainly  is  inexplicable  if  the  cause  of />  h  had  been  the  want 
of  power  on  the  part  of  the  aborigines  to  produce  the  /  sound  at 
all,  while  it  is  simple  enough  if  we  assume  a  later  transition,  taking 
place  possibly  at  first  between  two   vowels,   with  a  subsequent 
generalization  of  the /-less  forms.     Diez  is  here,  as  not  infrequently, 
more  sensible  than  some  of  his  successors  (see  Gramm.  d.  roman. 
spr.,  4th  ed.,  1.  283  f.,  373  f.). 

XL— §  3.  Gothonic  and  Keltic. 

Feist  (KI  480  fE.:  cf.  PBB  36.  307  ff.,  37.  112  fE.)  applies  the 
substratum  theory  to  the  Gothonic  (Germanic)  languages.    The 
Gothons  are  autochthonous  in  northern  Europe,  and  very  little 
mixed  with  other  races  ;   they  must  have  immigrated  just  after 
the  close  of  the  glacial  period.     But  the  arrival  of  Aiyan   (Indo- 
germanic)  tribes  cannot  be  placed  earlier  than  about  2000  B.C.  ; 
they  made  the  original  inhabitants  give  up  their  own  language. 
The  nation  that  thus  Aryanized  the  Gothons  cannot  have  been 
other  than  the  Kelts  ;  their  supremacy  over  the  Gothons  is  proved 
by  several  loan-words  for  cultural  ideas  or  state  offices,  such  as 
Gothic    reiks   'king,'  andbahts   'servant.'    The   Aryan   language 
which  the  Kelts  taught  the  Gothons  was  subjected  in  the  process 
to  considerable  changes,  the  old  North  Europeans  pronouncing 
the  new  language  in  accordance  with  their  previous  speech  habits  p 
instead  of  taking  over  the  free  Aryan  accent,  they  invariably  stressed 
the  initial  syllable,  and  they  made  sad  havoc  of  the  Arjan  flexion. 
The  theory  does  not  bear  close  inspection.     The  number  of 
Keltic  loan-words  is  not  great  enough  for  us  to  infer  such  an  over- 
powering ascendancy  on  the  part  of  the  Kelts  as  would  force  the 
subjected  population  to  make  a  complete  surrender  of  their  own 
tongue.    Neither  in  number  nor  in  intrinsic  significance  can  these 
loans  be  compared  with  the  French  loans  in  English  :    and  yet 
the  Normans  did  not  succeed  in  substituting  their  own  language 
for  English.     Besides,  if  the  theory  were  true,  we  should  not  merely 
see  a  certain  number  of  Keltic  loan-words,  but  the  whole  speech, 
the  complete  vocabulary  as  well  as  the  entire  grammar,  would  be 
Keltic  ;  yet  as  a  matter  of  fact  there  is  a  wide  gulf  between  Keltic 


§8]  GOTHONIC   AND   KELTIC  195 

and  Gothonic,  and  many  details,  lexical  and  grammatical,  in  the 
latter  group  resemble  other  Aryan  languages  rather  than  Keltic. 
The  stressing  of  the  first  syllable  is  said  to  be  due  to  the  aboriginal 
language.  If  that  were  so,  it  would  mean  that  this  population, 
in  adopting  the  new  speech,  had  at  once  transferred  its  own  habit 
of  stressing  the  first  sj'llable  to  all  the  new  words,  very  much  as 
Icelanders  are  apt  to  do  nowadays.  But  this  is  not  in  accordance 
with  well  established  facts  in  the  Gothonic  languages  :  we  know 
that  when  the  consonant  shift  took  place,  it  found  the  stress  on  the 
same  syllables  as  in  Sanskrit,  and  that  it  was  this  stress  on  many 
middle  or  final  syllables  that  afterwards  changed  many  of  the  shifted 
consonants  from  voiceless  to  voiced  (Verner's  law).^  This  fact  in 
itself  suffices  to  prove  that  the  consonant  shift  and  the  stress  shift 
cannot  have  taken  place  simultaneously,  and  thus  cannot  be  due 
to  one  and  the  same  cause,  as  supposed  by  Feist.  Nor  can  the 
havoc  wrought  in  the  old  flexions  be  due  to  the  inability  of  a  new 
people  to  grasp  the  minute  nuances  and  intricate  system  of  another 
language  than  its  own  ;  for  in  that  case  too  we  should  have  some- 
thing like  the  formless  '  Pidgin  English  '  from  the  very  beginning, 
whereas  the  oldest  Gothonic  languages  still  preserve  a  great 
many  old  flexions  and  subtle  s\Titactical  rules  which  have  since 
disappeared.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  many  of  the  flexions  of  primitive 
Aiyan  were  much  better  preserved  in  Gothonic  languages  than 
in  Keltic. 

XI. — §4.  Etruscan  and  Indian  Consonants. 

In  another  place  in  the  same  work  (KI  373)  Feist  speaks  of 
the  Etruscan  language,  and  says  that  this  had  only  one  kind  of 
stop  consonants,  represented  by  the  letters  h  (c),  t,  jp,  besides  the 
aapirated  stops  kh,  th,  i^Ji,  which  in  some  instances  correspond  to 
Latin  and  Greek  tenues.  This,  he  says,  reminds  one  very  strongly 
of  the  sound  system  of  High  German  (oberdeutschen)  dialects, 
and  more  particularly  of  those  spoken  in  the  Alps.  Feist  here 
(and  in  PBB  36.  340  fE.)  maintains  that  these  sounds  go  back  to 
a  Pre-Gothonic  Alpine  population,  which  he  identifies  with  the 
ancient  Rhsetians  ;  and  he  sees  in  this  a  strong  support  of  a 
linguistic  connexion  between  the  Rhaetians  and  Etruscans.  He 
finds  further  striking  analogies  between  the  Gothonic  and  the 
Armenian  soimd  systems ;  the  predilection  for  voiceless  stops 
and  aspirated  sounds  in  Etruscan,  in  the  domain  of  the  ancient 
Rhsetians  and  in  Asia  Minor  is  accordingly  ascribed  to  the  speech 
habits  of  one  and  the  same  aboriginal  race. 

^  Curiously  enough,  Feist  uses  this  argument  himself  against  Hirt  in 
his  earlier  paper,  PBB  37.   121. 


19C  THE   FOREIGNER  [ch.  xi 

Here,  too,  there  are  many  points  to  which  I  must  take  exception. 
It  is  not  quite  certain  that  the  usual  interpretation  of  Etruscan 
letters  is  correct ;  in  fact,  much  may  be  said  in  favour  of  the 
hypothesis  that  the  letters  rendered  p,  t,  k  stand  really  for  the 
sounds  of  b,  d,  g,  and  that  those  transcribed  ph,  th,  kh  (or  Greek  <f), 
d",  x)  represent  ordinary  p,  t,  k.  However  this  may  be,  Feist 
seems  to  be  speaking  here  almost  in  the  same  breath  of  the  first  (or 
common  Gothonic)  shift  and  of  the  second  (or  specially  High  Ger- 
man) shift,  although  they  are  separated  from  each  other  by  several 
centuries  and  neither  cover  the  same  geographical  ground  nor  lead 
to  the  same  phonetic  result.  Neither  Armenian  nor  primitive 
Gothonic  can  be  said  to  be  averse  to  voiced  stops,  for  in  both  we 
find  voiced  6,  d,  g  for  the  old  'mediae  aspiratae.'  And  in  both 
languages  the  old  voiceless  stops  became  at  first  probably  not 
aspirates,  but  simply  voiceless  spirants,  as  in  English  /ather,  thing, 
and  Scotch  loc^^.  Further,  it  should  be  noted  that  we  do  not  find 
the  tendency  to  unvoice  stops  and  to  pronounce  affricates  either 
in  Rhseto-Romanic  (Ladin)  or  in  Tuscan  Italian  ;  both  languages 
have  unaspirated  p,  t,  k  and  voiced  b,  d,  g,  and  the  Tuscan 
pronunciation  of  c  between  two  vowels  as  [x],  thus  in  la  casa 
[la  xa'sa],  but  not  in  a  casa  =  [akka'sa],  could  not  be  termed 
'  aspiration  '  except  by  a  non-phonetician  ;  this  pronunciation 
can  hardly  have  anything  to  do  with  the  old  Etruscan  language. 

According  to  a  theory  which  is  very  widely  accepted,  the 
Dravidian  languages  exerted  a  different  influence  on  the  Aryan 
languages  when  the  Aryans  first  set  foot  on  Indian  soil,  in  making 
them  adopt  the  '  cacuminal '  (or  '  inverted  ')  sounds  d,  t,  n  with 
dh  and  th,  which  were  not  found  in  primitive  Arj^an.  But  even 
this  theory  does  not  seem  to  be  quite  proof  against  objections. 
It  is  easy  to  admit  that  natives  accustomed  to  one  place  of  articula- 
tion of  their  d,  t,  n  will  unconsciously  produce  the  d,  <,  w  of  a  new 
language  they  are  learning  in  the  same  place  ;  but  then  they  will 
do  it  everywhere.  Here,  however,  both  Dravidian  and  Sanskrit 
possess  pure  dental  d,  t,  n,  pronounced  with  the  tip  of  the  tongue 
touching  the  upper  teeth,  besides  cacuminal  ^,  t,  n,  in  which  it 
touches  the  gum  or  front  part  of  the  hard  palate.  In  Sanskrit 
we  find  that  the  cacuminal  articulation  occurs  only  under  very 
definite  conditions,  chiefly  under  the  influence  of  r.  Now,  a  trilled 
tongue-point  r  in  most  languages,  for  purely  physiological  reasons 
which  are  easily  accounted  for,  tends  to  be  pronounced  further 
back  than  ordinary  dentals  ;  and  it  is  therefore  quite  natural 
that  it  should  spontaneously  exercise  an  influence  on  neighbouring 
dentals  by  drawing  them  back  to  its  own  point  of  articulation. 
This  may  have  happened  in  India  quite  independently  of  the  occur- 
rence of  the  same  sounds  in  other  vernaculars,  just  as  we  find 


§4]       ETRUSCAN  AND   INDIAN   CONSONANTS       197 

the  same  influence  very  pronouncedly  in  Swedish  and  in  East 
Norwegian,  where  d,  t,  n,  s  are  cacuminal  (supradental)  in  such 
words  as  bord,  kort,  barn,  forst,  etc.  According  to  Grandgent 
{Neuere  Sprachen,  2.  447),  d  in  his  own  American  English 
is  pronounced  further  back  than  elsewhere  before  and  after  r, 
as  in  dry,  hard ;  but  in  none  of  these  cases  need  we  conjure 
up  an  extinct  native  population  to  account  for  a  perfectly 
natural  development. 


XI.— §  5.  Gothonic  Sound-shift. 

Since  the  time  of  Grimm  the  Gothonic  consonant  changes 
have  harassed  the  minds  of  linguists  ;  they  became  the  sound- 
shift  and  were  considered  as  something  sui  generis,  something  out 
of  the  common,  which  required  a  different  explanation  from  all 
other  sound-shifts.  Several  explanations  have  been  offered,  to 
some  of  which  we  shall  have  to  revert  later ;  none,  however,  has 
been  so  popular  as  that  which  attributes  the  shift  to  an  ethnic 
substratum.  This  explanation  is  accepted  by  Hirt,  Feist,  Meillet 
and  others,  though  their  agreement  ceases  when  the  question  is 
asked  :  What  nationality  and  what  language  can  have  been  the 
cause  of  the  change  ?  While  some  cautiously  content  themselves 
with  saying  that  there  must  have  been  an  original  population, 
others  guess  at  Kelts,  Finns,  Rhaetians  or  Etrurians — all  fascinating 
names  to  minds  of  a  speculative  turn. 

The  latest  treatment  of  the  question  that  I  have  seen  is  by 
K.  Wessely  (in  Anthropos,  XII-XIII  540  ff.,  1917).  He  assumes 
the  following  different  substrata,  beginning  with  the  most  recent  : 
a  Rhseto-Romanic  for  the  Upper-German  shift,  a  Keltic  for  the 
common  High-German  shift,  and  a  Finnic  for  the  first  Germanic 
shift  with  the  Vernerian  law.  This  certainly  has  the  merit  of  neatly 
separating  soimd-shifts  that  are  chronologically  apart,  except 
with  regard  to  the  last-mentioned  shift,  for  here  the  Finns  are 
made  responsible  for  two  changes  that  were  probably  separated 
by  centuries  and  had  really  no  traits  in  common.  It  is  curious  to 
see  the  transition  from  p  to  f  and  from  t  to  p — both  important 
elements  of  the  first  shift — here  ascribed  to  Finnic,  for  as  a  matter 
of  fact  the  two  sounds/  and  J?  are  not  found  in  present-day  Finnish, 
and  were  not  found  in  primitive  Ugro -Finnic.^ 

1  Feist,  on  the  other  hand  (PBB  36.  329),  makes  the  Kelts  responsible 
for  the  shift  from  p  to  /,  because  initial  p  disappears  in  Keltic  :  but  dis- 
appearance is  not  the  same  thing  as  being  changed  into  a  spirant,  and  there 
is  no  necessity  for  assuming  that  the  sound  before  disappearing  had  been 
changed  into  /.  Besides,  it  is  characteristic  of  the  Gothonic  shift  that  it 
affects  all  stops  equally,  without  regard  to  the  place  of  articulation,  while 
the  Keltic  change  affects  only  the  one  sound  p. 


198  THE   FOREIGNER  [en.  xi 

When  Wcssely  thinks  that  the  change  discovered  by  Verner 
is  also  due  to  Finnic  influence,  his  reasons  are  two :  an  alleged 
parallelism  with  the  Finnic  consonant  change  which  he  terms 
'  Setala's  law,'  and  then  the  assumption  that  such  a  shift,  conditioned 
by  the  place  of  the  accent,  is  foreign  to  the  Aryan  race  (p.  643). 
When,  however,  we  find  a  closely  analogous  case  only  four  hundred 
years  ago  in  English,  where  a  number  of  consonants  were  voiced 
according  to  the  place  of  the  stress,^  are  we  also  to  say  that  it  is 
foreign  to  the  Anglo-Saxon  race  and  therefore  presupposes  some 
non-Arj^an  substratum  ?  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  parallelism 
between  the  English  and  the  old  Gothonic  shift  is  much  closer 
than  that  between  the  latter  and  the  Finnic  consonant-gradation  : 
in  English  and  in  old  Gothonic  the  stress  place  is  decisive,  while 
in  the  Finnic  shift  it  is  very  doubtful  ^^'hether  stress  goes  for  any- 
thing ;  in  both  English  and  old  Gothonic  the  same  consonants  are 
afifccted  (spirants,  in  English  also  the  combinations  [if,  ks],  but 
otherwise  no  stops),  while  in  Finnic  it  is  the  stops  that  are  primarily 
affected.  In  old  Gothonic,  as  in  English,  the  change  is  simply 
voicing,  and  we  have  nothing  corresponding  to  the  reduction  of 
double  consonants  and  of  consonant  groups  in  Finnic  pcr^^^n  /  papin, 
otta  I  otat,  kukka  I  kukan,  parempi  / paremman,  jalka  /  jalan,  etc. 
On  the  whole,  Wessely's  paper  shows  how  much  easier  it  is  to 
advance  hypotheses  than  to  find  truths. 


XI. — §  6.  Natural  and  Specific  Changes. 

Meillet  (MSL  19.  164  and  172  ;  cf.  Bulletin  19.  50  and  Germ.  18) 
thinks  that  we  must  distinguish  between  such  phonetic  changes 
as  are  natural,  i.e.  due  to  universal  tendencies,  and  such  as  are 
peculiar  to  certain  languages.  In  the  former  class  he  includes 
the  opening  and  the  voicing  of  intervocalic  consonants  ;  there 
is  also  a  natural  and  universal  tendency  to  shorten  long  words 
and  to  slur  the  pronunciation  towards  the  end  of  a  word.  In  the 
latter  class  (changes  which  are  peculiar  to  and  characteristic  of 
a  particular  language)  he  reckons  the  consonant  shifts  in  Gothonic 
and  Armenian,  the  weakening  of  consonants  in  Greek  and  in 
Iranian,  the  tendency  to  unround  back  vowels  in  English  and 
Slav.  Such  changes  can  only  be  accounted  for  on  the  supposition 
of  a  change  of  language  :  they  must  be  due  to  people  whose  own 
language  had  habits  foreign  to  Aryan.  Unfortimately,  Meillet 
cannot  tell  us  hoAv  to  measure  the  difference  between  natural  and 

^  ME.  knowlechc,  stones  [sto-nes],  off,  with  [wij>]  become  MnE.  knowledge, 
stones  [stounz],  of  [ov,  ev],  with  [wi5],  etc.  ;  cf.  also  posse-ss,  discern  with  [z], 
exert  with  [gz],  but  exercise  with  [ks].  See  my  Studier  over  eng.  kasus,  1891, 
178  ff.,  now  MEG  i.  6.  5  fi.,  and  (for  the  phonetic  explanation)  LPh  p.  121. 


§0]  NATURAL    AND   SPECIFIC   CHANGES  199 

peculiar  shifts  ;  he  admits  that  they  cannot  always  be  clearly 
separated  ;  and  A\'hen  he  says  that  there  are  some  extreme  cases 
'  relativcment  nets,'  such  as  those  named  above,  I  must  confess 
that  I  do  not  see  whj'  the  change  from  the  sliarp  tenuis,  as  in  Fr. 
p,  t,  k,  to  a  slightly  aspirated  sound,  as  in  English  {Bulletin  19.  50),^ 
or  the  relaxing  of  the  closure  which  finally  led  to  the  sounds  of 
[f ,  y>,  x],  should  be  less  '  natural  '  than  a  hundred  other  changes 
and  should  require  the  calling  in  of  a  deus  ex  mackina  in  the  shape 
of  an  aboriginal  population.  The  imrounding  of  E.  w  in  Jmt,  etc., 
to  which  he  alludes,  began  about  1600 — what  ethnic  substratum 
does  that  postulate,  and  is  any  such  requii'cd,  more  than  for,  say, 
the  diphthongizing  of  long  a  and  o  ? 

Meillet  (MSL  19.  172)  also  says  that  there  are  certain  speech 
sounds  which  are,  as  it  were,  natural  and  are  found  in  nearly  all 
languages,  thus  p,  t,  k,  n,  m,  and  among  the  vowels  a,  i,  u,  while  other 
sounds  are  found  only  in  some  languages,  such  as  the  two  English 
th  sounds  or,  among  the  vowels,  Fr.  u  and  Russian  y.     But  when 
he  infers  that  sounds  of  the  former  class  are  stable  and  remain 
unchanged  for  many  centuries,  whereas  those  of  the  latter  are  apt 
to  change  and  disappear,  the  conclusion  is  not  borne  out  by  actual 
facts.     The  consonants  p,  t,  k,  n,  m  are  said  to  have  remained 
unchanged  in  many  Aryan  languages  from  the  oldest  times  till 
the  present  day — that  is,  only  initially  before  vowels,  which  is  a 
very  important  reservation  and  really  amounts  to  an  admission 
that  in  the  vast  majority  of  cases  these  sounds  are  just  as  unstable 
as  most  other  things  on  this  planet,  especially  if  we  remember  that 
notlung  could  well  be  more  unstable  than  k  before  front  vowels, 
as  seen  in  It.  [t/]   and  Sp.  [)?]  in  cielo,  Fr.  [s]  in  del,  and  [/]  in 
chien,  Eng.  and  Swedish  [t/]  in  chin,  kind,  Norwegian  [c]  in  kind, 
Russian  [t/]  in  cetyre  '  four  '  and  [s]  in  sto  '  hundred,'  etc.      As 
an  example  of  a  typically  unstable  sound  Meillet  gives  bilabial  /, 
and  it  is  true  that  this  sound  is  so  rare  that  it  is  difficult  to  find 
it  represented  in  any  language  ;  the  reason  is  simply  that  the  upper 
teeth  normally  protrude  above  the  lower  jaw,  and  that  consequently 
the  lower  lip  articulates  easily  against  the  upper  teeth,  with  the 
natural  result  that  where  we  should  theoretically  expect  the  bilabial 
/  the  labiodental  /  takes  its  place.     And  s,  which  is  found  almost 
universally,  and  should  therefore  on  Meillet 's  theory  be  very  stable, 
is  often  seen  to  change  into  h  or  [x]  or  to  disappear.     On  the  whole, 
then,  we  see  that  it  is  not  the  'naturalness  '  or  universality  of  a 

^  Sharp  tenues  and  aspirated  tenues  may  alternate  even  in  the  life  of 
one  individual,  as  I  have  observed  in  the  case  of  my  own  son,  who  at  the 
age  of  1.9  used  the  sharp  French  sounds,  but  five  months  later  substituted 
strongly  aspirated  p,  t,  I:,  with  even  stronger  aspiration  than  the  usual  Danish 
Bounds,  which  it  took  him  ten  or  eleven  months  to  learn  with  perfect  certainty. 


200  THE  FOREIGNER  [ch.  xi 

consonant  so  much  as  its  position  in  the  syllable  and  word  that 
decides  the  question  '  change  or  no  change.'  The  relation  between 
stability  and  naturalness  is  seen,  perhaps,  most  clearly  in  such  an 
instance  as  long  [a] :  this  sound  is  so  natural  that  English,  from 
the  oldest  Aryan  to  present-day  speech,  has  never  been  without 
it ;  yet  at  no  time  has  it  been  stable,  but  as  soon  as  one  class  of 
words  with  long  [a*]  is  changed,  a  new  class  steps  into  its  shoes  : 
(1)  Aryan  mater,  now  mother;  (2)  lengthening  of  a  short  a  before 
n  :  gas,  brdhta,  now  goose,  brought ;  (3)  levelling  of  ai :  stun,  now 
sto7ie ;  (4)  lengthening  of  short  a  :  cdld,  now  cold  ;  (5)  later  lengthen- 
ing of  a  in  open  syllable  :  name,  now  [neim] ;  (6)  mod.  carve,  calm, 
path  and  others  from  various  sources ;  and  (7)  vulgar  speech  is  now 
developing  new  levellings  of  diphthongs  in  [ma-1,  pa- (a)]  for  mile, 
power. 

XI.— §  7.  Power  of  Substratum. 

V.  Brondal  has  made  the  attempt  to  infuse  new  blood  into 
the  substratum  theory  through  his  book,  Substrater  eg  Laan  i 
Romansk  og  Germansk  (Copenhagen,  1917).  The  effect  of  a  sub- 
stratum, according  to  him,  is  the  establishment  of  a  '  constant 
idiom,'  working  "without  regard  to  place  and  time  "  (p.  76)  and 
changing,  for  instance,  Latin  into  Old  French,  Old  French  into 
Classical  French,  and  Classical  French  into  Modern  French.  His 
task,  then,  is  to  find  out  certain  tendencies  operating  at  these 
various  yjeriods  ;  these  are  ascribed  to  the  Keltic  substratum, 
and  Brondal  then  passes  in  review  a  great  many  languages  spoken 
in  districts  where  Kelts  are  known  to  have  lived  in  former  times, 
in  order  to  find  the  same  tendencies  there.  If  he  succeeds  in  this 
to  his  own  satisfaction,  it  is  only  because  the  '  tendencies  '  estab- 
lished are  partly  so  vague  that  they  will  fit  into  any  language, 
partly  so  ill -defined  phonetically  that  it  becomes  possible  to  press 
different,  nay,  in  some  cases  even  directly  contrary  movements 
into  the  same  class.  But  considerations  of  space  forbid  me  to 
enter  on  a  detailed  criticism  here.  I  must  content  myself  with 
taking  exception  to  the  principle  that  the  effect  of  the  ethnic 
substratum  may  shoAv  itself  several  generations  after  the  speech 
substitution  took  place.  If  Keltic  ever  had  '  a  finger  in  the  pie,' 
it  must  have  been  immediately  on  the  taking  over  of  the  new 
language.  An  influence  exerted  in  such  a  time  of  transition  may 
have  far-reaching  after-effects,  like  anjthing  else  in  history,  but 
this  is  not  the  same  thing  as  asserting  that  a  similar  modification 
of  the  language  may  take  place  after  the  lapse  of  some  centuries 
as  an  effect  of  the  same  cause.  Suppose  we  have  a  series  of  manu- 
scripts, A,  B,  C,  D,  etc.,  of  which  B  is  copied  from  A,  C  from  B, 


§7]  POWER   OF   SUBSTRATUM  201 

etc.,  and  that  B  has  an  error  which  is  repeated  in  all  the  following 
copies  ;  now,  if  M  suddenly  agrees  with  A  (which  the  copyist  has 
never  seen),  we  infer  that  this  reading  is  independent  of  A,  In  the 
same  way  with  a  language  :  each  individual  learns  it  from  his  contem- 
poraries, but  has  no  opportunity  of  hearing  those  who  have  died 
before  his  o^^•n  time.  It  is  possible  that  the  transition  from  a  to  cb 
in  Old  English  (as  in  feeder)  is  due  to  Keltic  influence,  but  when 
we  find,  many  centuries  later,  that  a  is  changed  into  fae]  (the  present 
sound)  in  words  which  had  not  cb  in  OE.,  e.g.  crab,  hallow,  act,  it  is 
impossible  to  ascribe  this,  as  Brondal  does,  to  a  '  constant  Keltic 
idiom  '  working  through  many  generations  who  had  never  sjDoken 
or  heard  any  Keltic.  '  Atavism,'  which  skips  over  one  or  more 
generations,  is  unthinkable  here,  for  words  and  sounds  are  nothing 
but  habits  acquired  by  imitation. 

So  far,  then,  our  discussion  of  the  substratum  theory  has  brought 
us  no  ver}''  positive  results.  One  of  the  reasons  why  the  theories 
put  forward  of  late  j^ears  have  been  on  the  whole  so  unsatisfactory 
is  that  they  deal  with  speech  substitutions  that  have  taken  place 
so  far  back  that  absolutely  nothing,  or  practically  nothing,  is  known 
of  those  displaced  languages  which  are  supposed  to  have  coloured 
languages  now  existing.  ^Vllat  do  we  know  beyond  the  mere 
name  of  Ligurians  or  Veneti  or  Iberians  ?  Of  the  Pre-Germanic 
and  Pre-Keltic  peoples  we  know  not  even  the  names.  As  to  the 
old  Kelts  who  play  such  an  eminent  role  in  all  these  speculations, 
we  know  extremely  little  about  their  language  at  this  distant  date, 
and  it  is  possible  that  in  some  cases,  at  any  rate,  the  Kelts  may  have 
been  only  comparatively  small  armies  conquering  this  or  that 
country  for  a  time,  but  leaving  as  few  linguistic  traces  behind 
them  as,  say,  the  armies  of  Napoleon  in  Russia  or  the  Cimbri  and 
Teutoni  in  Italy.  Linguists  have  turned  from  the  '  glottogonic  ' 
speculations  of  Bopp  and  his  disciples,  only  to  indulge  in  dia- 
lectogonic  speculations  of  exactly  the  same  visionary  type. 

XI. — §  8.  Types  of  Race-mixture. 

It  would  be  a  great  mistake  to  suppose  that  the  conditions, 
and  consequently  the  linguistic  results,  are  always  the  same, 
whenever  two  different  races  meet  and  assimilate.  The  chief 
classes  of  race-mixture  have  been  thus  described  in  a  valuable 
paper  by  George  Hempl  {Transactions  of  the  American  Philological 
Association,  XXIX,  p.  31  ff.,  1898). 

(1)  The  conquerors  are  a  comparatively  small  body,  who  become 
the  ruling  class,  but  are  not  numerous  enough  to  impose  their 
language  on  the  country.  They  are  forced  to  learn  the  language 
of  their  subjects,  and  their  grandchildren  may  come  to  know  that 


202  THE  FOREIGNER  [ch.  xi 

language  better  than  they  know  the  language  of  their  ancestors. 
The  language  of  the  conquerors  dies  out,  but  bi^queaths  to  the  native 
language  its  terms  pertaining  to  government,  tjie  aimy,  and  those 
other  spheres  of  life  that  the  conquerors  had  specially  under  their 
control.  Historic  examples  are  the  cases  of  the  Goths  in  Italy 
and  Spain,  the  Franks  in  Gaul,  the  Normans  in  France  and  the 
Norman-French  in  England.  Of  course,  the  greater  the  number 
of  the  conquerors  and  the  longer  they  had  been  close  neighbours 
of  the  people  they  conquered,  or  maintained  the  bonds  that  united 
them  to  their  mother-country,  the  greater  was  their  influence. 
Thus  the  influence  of  the  Franks  on  the  language  of  France  was 
greater  than  that  of  the  Goths  on  the  language  of  Spain,  and  the 
influence  of  the  Norman-French  in  England  was  greater  still.  Yet 
in  each  case  the  minority  ultimately  succumbed. 

(2a)  The  conquest  is  made  by  many  bodies  of  invaders,  who 
bring  with  them  their  whole  households  and  are  followed  for  a  long 
period  of  time  by  similar  hordes  of  their  kinsmen.  The  conquerors 
constitute  the  upper  and  middle  classes  and  a  part  of  the  lower 
classes  of  the  new  community.  The  natives  recede  before  the 
conquerors  or  become  their  slaves  :  their  speech  is  regarded  as 
servile  and  is  soon  laid  aside,  except  for  a  few  terms  pertaining 
to  the  humbler  callings,  the  names  of  things  peculiar  to  the  country 
and  place-names.  Examples :  Angles  and  Saxons  in  Britain 
and  Europeans  in  America  and  Australia,  though  in  the  last  case 
we  can  hardly  speak  of  race-mixture  between  the  natives  and  the 
immigrants. 

(26)  A  more  powerful  nation  conquers  the  people  and  annexes 
its  territory,  which  is  made  a  province,  to  which  not  only  governors 
and  soldiers,  but  also  merchants  and  even  colonists  are  sent.  These 
become  the  upper  class  and  the  influential  part  of  the  middle  class. 
If  centuries  pass  and  the  province  is  still  subjected  to  the  direct 
influence  of  the  ruling  country,  it  will  more  and  more  imitate* 
the  speech  and  the  habits  and  customs  of  that  country.  Such 
was  the  history  of  Italy,  Spain  and  Gaul  under  the  Romans  ; 
similar,  also,  is  the  story  of  the  Slavs  of  Eastern  Germany  and  of 
the  Dutch  in  New  York  State  ;  such  is  the  process  going  on  to-day 
among  the  French  in  Louisiana  and  among  the  Germans  in  their 
original  settlements  in  Penns3ivania. 

(3)  Immigrants  come  in  scattered  bands  and  at  different 
times  ;  they  become  servants  or  follow  other  humble  callings. 
It  is  usually  not  to  their  advantage  to  associate  with  their  fellow- 
countrjTuen,  but  rather  to  mingle  with  the  native  population. 
The  better  they  learn  to  speak  the  native  tongue,  the  faster  they 
get  on  in  the  world.  If  their  children  in  their  dress  or  speech 
betray  their  foreign  origin,  they  are  ridiculed  as  '  Dutch '  or  Irish, 


§8]  TYPES    OF    RACE-MIXTURE  203 

or  whatever  it  may  be.  They  therefore  take  pains  to  rid  themselves 
of  all  traces  of  their  alien  origin  and  avoid  using  the  speech  of  their 
parents.  In  this  way  vast  numbers  of  newcomers  may  be  assimi- 
lated year  by  j'ear  till  they  constitute  a  large  part  of  the  new  race, 
while  their  language  makes  practically  no  impression  on  the  lan- 
guage of  the  country.  This  is  the  storj'  of  what  is  going  on  in  all 
parts  of  the  United  States  to-day. 

It  will  be  seen  that  in  classes  1  and  3  the  speech  of  the  natives 
prevails,  while  in  the  two  classes  comprised  under  2  it  is  that  of 
the  conqueror  which  eventually  triumphs.  Further,  that,  in  all 
cases  except  type  26,  that  language  prevails  which  is  spoken  by 
what  is  at  the  time  the  majority. 

Somid  substitution  is  found  in  class  3  in  the  case  of  foreigners 
who  come  to  America  after  they  have  learnt  to  speak,  and  of  the 
children  of  foreigners  who  keep  up  their  original  language  at  home. 
If,  hoAvever,  while  they  are  still  young,  they  are  chiefly  thrown 
with  English-speaking  people,  the}-  usually  gain  a  thorough  mastery 
of  the  English  language  ;  thus  most  of  the  children,  and  practically 
all  of  the  grandchikh-en,  of  immigrants,  by  the  time  they  are  grown- 
up, speak  English  without  foreign  taint.  Their  origin  has  thus 
no  permanent  influence  on  their  adopted  language.  The  same 
thing  is  true  when  a  small  ruling  minority  drops  its  foreign  speech 
and  learns  that  of  the  majority  (class  1),  and  practically  also 
(class  2a)  when  a  native  minority  succumbs  to  a  foreign  majority, 
though  here  the  ultimate  language  may  be  slightly  influenced 
by  the  native  dialect. 

It  is  different  with  class  26  :  when  a  whole  population  comes 
in  the  course  of  centuries  to  surrender  its  natural  speech  for  that 
of  a  ruling  minority,  sound  substitution  plaj^s  an  important  part, 
and  to  a  great  extent  determines  the  character  and  future  of  the 
language.  Hempl  here  agrees  with  Hirt  in  seeing  in  this  fact 
the  explanation  of  much  (N.B,  not  all !)  of  the  difference  between 
the  Romanic  languages  and  of  the  difference  between  natural 
High  German  and  High  German  spoken  in  Low  German  territory, 
and  he  is  therefore  not  surprised  when  he  is  told  by  Nissen  that 
the  dialects  of  modern  Italy  correspond  geographically  pretty 
closely  to  the  non -Latin  languages  once  spoken  in  the  Peninsula. 
But  he  severely  criticizes  Hirt  for  going  so  far  as  to  explain  the 
differentiation  of  Aryan  speech  by  the  theory  of  soimd  substitution. 
Hirt  assumes  conditions  like  those  in  class  1,  and  yet  thinks  that 
the  results  would  be  like  those  of  class  2a.  "  It  is  essential  to  Hirt's 
theory  that  the  conquering  bodies  of  Indo-Europeans  should  be 
small  compared  with  the  number  of  the  people  they  conquered.  .  .  . 
If  we  wish  to  prove  that  the  differentiation  of  Indo-European 
speech  was  like  the  differentiation  of  Romance  speech,  we  must 


204  THE  FOREIGNER  [ch.  xi 

be  able  to  show  that  the  conditions  under  which  the  differentiations 
took  place  were  alike  or  equivalent.  But  even  a  cursory  examina- 
tion of  the  manner  in  which  the  Romance  countries  were  Romanized 
.  .  .  will  make  it  clear  that  no  parallel  could  possibly  be  drawn 
between  the  conditions  under  which  the  Romance  languages 
arose  and  those  that  we  can  suppose  to  have  existed  while  the 
Indo-European  languages  took  shape."  Hempl  also  criticizes  the 
way  in  which  the  Germanic  consonant-shift  is  supposed  by  Hirt 
to  be  due  to  sound-substitution  :    when  instead  of  the  original 

t  th  d  dh 

Germanic  has 

V       y         t       5, 

these  latter  sounds,  on  Hirt's  theory,  must  be  either  the  native 
sounds  that  the  conquered  people  substituted  for  the  original 
sounds,  or  else  they  have  developed  out  of  such  sounds  as  the  natives 
substituted.  If  the  first  be  true,  we  ask  ourselves  why  the  con- 
quered people  did  not  use  their  t  for  the  Indo-European  t,  instead 
of  substituting  it  for  d,  and  then  substituting  ]>  for  the  Indo-Euro- 
l^ean  t.  If  the  second  supposition  be  true,  the  native  population 
introduced  into  the  language  sounds  very  similar  to  the  original 
t,  ill,  d,  dh,  and  all  tlie  change  from  that  slightly  variant  form 
to  the  one  that  we  find  in  Germanic  was  of  subsequent  development 
— and  must  be  explained  by  the  usual  methods  after  all. 

I  have  dwelt  so  long  on  Hempl's  paper  because,  in  spite  of  its 
(to  my  mind)  fundamental  importance,  it  has  been  generally  over- 
looked by  supporters  of  the  substratum  theory.  To  construct 
a  true  theory,  it  will  be  necessary  to  examine  the  largest  possible 
number  of  facts  with  regard  to  race-mixture  capable  of  being 
tested  by  scientific  methods.  In  this  connexion  the  observations 
of  Lenz  in  South  America  and  of  Puscariu  in  Rumania  are  espe-* 
cially  valuable.  The  former  found  that  the  Spanish  spoken  in  Chile 
was  greatly  influenced  in  its  sounds  by  the  speech  of  the  native 
Araucanians  (see  Zeitschr.  f.  roman.  Philohgie,  17.  188  If.,  1893). 
Now,  what  were  the  facts  in  regard  to  the  population  speaking 
this  language  ?  The  immigrants  were  chiefly  men,  who  in  many 
cases  necessarily  married  native  women  and  left  the  care  of  their 
children  to  a  great  extent  in  the  hands  of  Indian  servants.  As 
the  natives  were  more  warlike  than  in  many  other  parts  of 
South  America,  there  was  for  a  very  long  time  a  continuous 
influx  of  Spanish  soldiers,  many  of  whom,  after  a  short  time, 
settled  down  peacefully  in  the  country.  More  Spanish  soldiers, 
indeed,  arrived  in  Chile  in  the  course  of  the  sixteenth 
and  seventeenth  centimes  than  in    the  whole    of    the    rest    of 


§8]  TYPES   OF   RACE-MIXTURE  205 

South  America,  Accordingly,  by  the  beginning  of  the  eighteenth 
century  the  Indians  had  been  either  driven  back  or  else  assimi- 
lated, and  at  the  beginning  of  the  War  of  Liberation  early  in 
the  nineteenth  century  Chile  was  the  only  State  in  which  there 
was  a  uniform  Spanish-speaking  population.  In  the  greater  part 
of  Chile  the  popiilation  is  denser  than  anywhere  else  in  South 
America,  and  this  population  speaks  nothing  but  Spanish,  while 
in  Peru  and  Bolivia  nearlj'  the  whole  rural  population  still  speaks 
more  or  less  exclusively  Keshua  or  Aimard,  and  these  languages 
are  also  used  occasionally,  or  at  any  rate  understood,  by  the  whites. 
Chile  is  thus  the  only  country  in  which  a  real  Spanish  people's 
dialect  could  develop.  (In  Hempl's  classification  this  would  be 
a  ty]Dical  case  of  class  2a.)  In  the  other  Spanish  American  coun- 
tries the  Spanish-speakers  are  confined  to  the  upper  ruling  class, 
there  being  practically  no  lower  class  with  Spanish  as  its  mother- 
tongue,  except  in  a  couple  of  big  cities.  Thus  we  understand  that 
the  Peruvian  who  has  learnt  his  Spanish  at  school  has  a  purer 
Castilian  pronunciation  than  the  Chilean  ;  yet,  apart  from  pro- 
nunciation, the  educated  Chilean's  Spanish  is  much  more  correct 
and  fluent  than  that  of  the  other  South  Americans,  whose  language 
is  stiff  and  vocabulary  scanty,  because  they  have  first  learnt  some 
Indian  language  in  cliildhood.  Lenz's  Chileans,  who  have  often 
been  invoked  by  the  adherents  of  the  unlimited  substratum  theory, 
thus  really  serve  to  show  that  sound  substitution  takes  place 
only  under  certain  well-defined  conditions. 

Puscariu  (in  Prinzipienfragen  der  romanischen  Sprachwissen- 
schaft,  Beihefte  zur  Zschr.  f.  rom.  Phil.,  1910)  says  that  in  a  Saxon 
village  which  had  been  almost  completely  Rumanianized  he  had 
once  talked  for  hours  with  a  peasant  without  noticing  that  he 
was  not  a  native  Rumanian  :  he  was,  however,  a  Saxon,  who  spoke 
Saxon  with  his  wife,  but  Rumanian  with  his  son,  because  the 
latter  language  was  easier  to  him,  as  he  had  acquired  the  Rumanian 
basis  of  articulation.  Here,  then,  there  was  no  sound  substitution, 
and  in  general  we  may  say  that  the  less  related  two  languages 
are,  the  fewer  will  be  the  traces  of  the  original  language  left  on 
the  new  language  (p.  49).  The  reason  must  be  that  people  who 
naturally  speak  a  closely  related  language  are  easily  understood 
even  when  their  acquired  speech  has  a  tinge  of  dialect :  there  is  thus 
no  inducement  for  them  to  give  up  their  pronunciation.  Puscariu 
also  found  that  it  was  much  more  difficult  for  him  to  rid  himself 
of  his  dialectal  traits  in  Rumanian  than  to  acquire  a  correct  pro- 
nunciation of  German  or  French.  He  therefore  disbelieves  in  a 
direct  influence  exerted  by  the  indigenous  languages  on  the  forma- 
tion of  the  Romanic  languages  (and  thus  goes  much  further  than 
Hempl).     All  these  languages,  and  particularly  Rumanian,  during 


206  THE   FOREIGNER  [ch.  xi 

the  first  centuries  of  the  IMiddle  Ages  underwent  radical  trans- 
formations not  paralleled  in  the  thousand  years  ensuing.  This 
may  have  been  paitly  due  to  an  influence  exerted  by  ethnic  mixture 
on  the  whole  character  of  the  young  nations  and  through  that  also 
on  their  language.  But  other  factors  have  certainly  also  plaj'ed 
an  important  role,  especially  the  grouping  round  new  centres 
with  other  political  aims  than  those  of  ancient  Rome,  and  conse- 
quent isolation  from  the  rest  of  the  Romanic  peoples.  Add  to  this 
the  very  important  emancipation  of  the  ordinary  conversational 
language  from  the  j'oke  of  Latin.  In  the  first  Christian  centuries 
the  influence  of  Latin  was  so  overpowering  in  official  life  and  in 
the  schools  that  it  obstructed  a  natural  development.  But  soon 
after  the  third  century  the  educational  level  rapidly  sank,  and 
political  events  broke  the  power  not  only  of  Rome,  but  also  of  its 
language.  The  speech  of  the  masses,  which  had  been  held  in  fetters 
for  so  long,  now  asserted  itself  in  full  freedom  and  with  elemental 
violence,  the  result  being  those  far-reaching  changes  by  which 
the  Romanic  languages  are  marked  ofiE  from  Latin.  Language 
and  nation  or  race  must  not  be  confounded  :  witness  Rumania, 
whose  language  shows  very  few  dialectal  variations,  though  the 
populations  of  its  different  provinces  are  ethnically  quite  distinct 
(ib.  p.  51). 

XI.— §9.  Summary. 

The  general  impression  gathered  from  the  preceding  investiga- 
tion must  be  that  it  is  impossible  to  ascribe  to  an  ethnic  substratum 
all  the  changes  and  dialectal  differentiations  which  some  linguists 
explain  as  due  to  this  sole  cause.  Many  other  influences  must 
have  been  at  work,  among  which  an  interruption  of  intercourse 
created  by  natural  obstacles  or  social  conditions  of  various  kinds 
would  be  of  prime  importance.  If  we  take  ethnic  substrata  as* 
the  main  or  sole  source  of  dialectal  differentiation,  it  will  be  hard 
to  account  for  the  differences  between  Icelandic  and  Norwegian, 
for  Iceland  was  very  sparsely  inhabited  when  the  '  land-taking  ' 
took  place,  and  still  harder  to  account  for  the  very  great  diver- 
gences that  we  Avitness  between  the  dialects  spoken  in  the  Faroe 
Islands.  A  mere  turning  over  the  leaves  of  Bennike  and  Kris- 
tensen's  maps  of  Danish  dialects  (or  the  corresponding  maps  of 
France)  will  show  the  impossibility  of  explaining  the  crisscross  of 
boundaries  of  various  phonetic  phenomena  as  entirely  due  to 
ethnical  differences  in  the  aborigines.  On  the  other  hand,  the  speech 
of  Russian  peasants  is  said  to  be  remarkably  free  from  dialectal 
divergences,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  it  has  spread  in  compara- 
tively recent  times  over  districts  inhabited  by  populations  with 


§  9]  SUMMARY  207 

languages  of  totally  different  types  (Finnic,  Turkish,  Tataric).  I 
thus  incline  to  think  that  soimd  substitution  cannot  have  pro- 
duced radical  changes,  but  has  only  played  a  minor  part  in  the 
development  of  languages.  There  are,  perhaps,  also  interesting 
things  to  be  learnt  from  conditions  in  Finland.  Here  Swedish 
has  for  many  centuries  been  the  language  of  the  ruling  minority', 
and  it  was  only  in  the  course  of  the  nineteenth  century  that  Finnish 
attained  to  the  dignity  of  a  literary  language.  The  sound  sj'stems 
of  Swedish  and  Finnish  are  extremely  unlike  :  Finnish  lacks  many 
of  the  Swedish  sounds,  such  as  b,  d  (wliat  is  ^vritten  d  is  either 
mute  or  else  a  kind  of  weak  r),  g  and  /.  No  word  can  begin  with 
more  than  one  consonant,  consequently  Swedish  strand  and  skrdd- 
dare,  '  tailor,'  are  represented  in  the  form  of  the  loan-words  ranta 
and  rddtdli.  Now,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  most  Swedish-speaking 
people  have  probably  spoken  Finnish  as  children  and  have  had 
Finnish  servants  and  playfellows  to  teach  them  the  language, 
none  of  these  peculiarities  have  influenced  their  Swedish  :  what 
makes  them  recognizable  as  hailing  from  Finland  ('  finska 
brytningen  ')  is  not  simplification  of  consonant  groups  or  substitu- 
tion of  'p  for  6,  etc.,  but  such  small  things  as  the  omission  of  the 
'  compound  tone,'  the  tendencj^  to  lengthen  the  second  consonant 
in  groups  like  ns,  and  European  ('  back  ')  u  instead  of  the  Swedish 
mixed  vowel. 

But  if  sound  substitution  as  a  result  of  race -mixture  and  of 
conquest  cannot  have  played  any  very  considerable  part  in  the 
differentiation  of  languages  as  wholes,  there  is  another  domain 
in  which  sound  substitution  is  very  important,  that  is,  in  the  shape 
which  loan-words  take  in  the  languages  into  which  they  are  intro- 
duced.    However  good  the  pronunciation  of  the  first  introducer 
of  a  word  may  have  been,  it  is  clear  that  when  a  word  is  extensively 
used  by  people  with  no  intimate  and  fii'st-hand  knowledge  of  the 
language  from  which  it  was  taken,  most  of  them  will  tend  to  pro- 
nounce it  with  the  only  sounds  with  which  they  are  familiar,  those 
of  their  own  language.     Thus  we  see  that  the  English  and  Rus- 
sians, who  have  no  [y]  in  their  own  speech,  substitute  for  it  the 
combination  [ju,  iu]  in  recent  loans  from  French.     Scandinavians 
have  no  voiced  [z]  and  [5]  and  therefore,  in  such  loans  from  French 
or  English  as  kusine,  budget,  jockey,  etc.,  substitute  the  voiceless 
[s]  and  [/j],  or  [sj].    The  English  will  make  a  diphthong  of  the 
final  vowels  of  such  words  as  bouquet,  beau  [bukei,  bou],  and  will 
slur  the  r  of  such  French  words  as  boulevard,  etc.     The  same  trans- 
ference of  speech  habits  from  one's  native  language  also  affects 
such  important  things  as  quantitj^,  stress  and  tone  :    the  English 
have  no  final  short  stressed  vowels,  such  as  are  found  in  bouquet, 
beau ;    hence  their  tendency  to  lengthen  as  well  as  diphthongize 


208  THE  FOREIGNER  [cii.  xi 

these  sounds,  while  the  French  will  stress  the  final  syllable  of 
recent  loans,  such  as  jury,  reporter.  These  phenomena  are  so  uni- 
versal and  so  well  known  that  they  need  no  further  illustration. 
The  more  familiar  such  loan-words  are,  the  more  unnatural 
it  would  be  to  pronounce  them  with  foreign  sounds  or  according 
to  foreign  rules  of  quantity  and  stress  ;  for  this  means  in  each 
case  a  shunting  of  the  whole  speech-apparatus  on  to  a  different 
track  for  one  or  two  words  and  then  shifting  back  to  the  original 
'  basis  of  articulation  ' — an  effort  that  many  speakers  are  quite 
incapable  of  and  one  that  in  any  case  interferes  with  the  natural 
and  easy  flow  of  speech. 


XI.— §  10.  General  Theory  of  Loan-words. 

In  the  last  paragraphs  we  have  already  broached  a  very  im- 
portant subject,  that  of  loan-words. ^  No  language  is  entirelj' 
free  from  borrowed  words,  because  no  nation  has  ever  been  com- 
pletely isolated.  Contact  with  other  nations  inevitably  leads  to 
borrowings,  though  their  number  may  vary  very  considerably. 
Here  we  meet  with  a  fundamental  principle,  first  formulated  by 
E.  Windisch  (in  his  paper  "  Zur  Theorie  der  Mschsprachen  und 
Lehnworter,"  Verh.  d.  sdchsischeyi  Qesellsch.  d.  Wissensch.,  XLIX, 
1897,  p.  107  ff.)  :  "  It  is  not  the  foreign  language  a  nation  learns 
that  turns  into  a  mixed  language,  but  its  own  native  language 
becomes  mixed  under  the  influence  of  a  foreign  language."  When 
we  try  to  learn  and  talk  a  foreign  tongue  we  do  not  introduce  into 
it  words  taken  from  our  own  language  ;  our  endeavour  will  always 
be  to  speak  the  other  language  as  purely  as  possible,  and  generally 
we  are  painfully  conscious  of  every  native  word  that  we  intrude 
into  phrases  framed  in  the  other  tongue.  But  what  we  thus  avoid 
in  speaking  a  foreign  language  we  very  often  do  in  our  own. 
Frederick  the  Great  prided  himself  on  his  good  French,  and  in  his 
French  writings  we  do  not  find  a  single  German  word,  but  whenever 
he  wrote  German  his  sentences  were  full  of  French  words  and 
phrases.  This  being  the  general  practice,  we  now  understand 
why  so  few  Keltic  words  were  taken  over  into  French  and 
English.     There  was  nothing  to  induce  the  ruling  classes  to  learn 

*  I  use  the  terms  loan-words  and  borrowed  ivords  because  thej'  are  con- 
venient and  firmly  established,  not  because  they  are  exact.  There  are  two 
essential  respects  in  which  linguistic  borrowing  differs  from  the  borrowing 
of,  say,  a  knife  or  money  :  the  lender  does  not  deprive  himself  of  the  use 
of  the  word  any  more  than  if  it  had  not  been  borrowed  by  the  other  partj',  and 
the  borrower  is  under  no  obligation  to  return  the  word  at  any  future  time. 
Linguistic  '  borrowing  '  is  really  nothing  but  imitation,  and  the  only  way 
in  which  it  differs  from  a  child's  imitation  of  its  parents'  speech  is  that  here 
something  is  imitated  which  forms  a  part  of  a  speech  that  is  not  imitated 
as  a  whole. 


§10]       GENERAL   THEORY    OF   LOAN-WORDS       209 

the  language  of  the  inferior  natives  :  it  could  never  be  fashionable 
for  them  to  show  an  acquaintance  with  a  desi^ised  tongue  by  using 
now  and  then  a  Keltic  word.  On  the  other  hand,  the  Kelt  would 
have  to  learn  the  language  of  his  masters,  and  learn  it  well ;  and 
he  would  even  among  his  comrades  like  to  show  off  his  knowledge 
by  interlarding  his  speech  with  words  and  turns  from  the  language 
of  his  betters.  Loan-words  always  show  a  superiority  of  the  nation 
from  whose  language  they  are  borrowed,  though  this  superiority 
may  be  of  many  different  kinds. 

In  the  first  place,  it  need  not  be  extensive  :  indeed,  in  some 
of  the  most  typical  cases  it  is  of  a  very  partial  character  and 
touches  only  on  one  very  special  point.  I  refer  to  those  instances 
in  which  a  district  or  a  people  is  in  possession  of  some  special 
thing  or  product  wanted  by  some  other  nation  and  not  produced 
in  that  country.  Here  quite  naturally  the  name  used  by  the  natives 
is  taken  over  along  with  the  thing.  Obvious  examples  are  the 
names  of  various  drinks  :  ivine  is  a  loan  from  Latin,  tea  from  Chinese,  J 
coffee  from  Arabic,  chocolate  from  Mexican,  and  punch  from  Hin-  ^' 
dustani.  A  certain  type  of  carriage  was  introduced  about  1500 
from  Hungary  and  is  known  in  most  European  languages  by  its 
Magj'ar  name  :  E.  coach,  G.  kutsche,  etc.  Moccasin  is  from 
Algonquin,  bamboo  from  Malay,  tulip  and  turban  (ultimately  the 
same  word)  from  Persian.  A  slightly  different  case  is  when  some 
previously  unknown  plant  or  animal  is  made  known  through  some 
foreign  nation,  as  when  Ave  have  taken  the  name  of  jasmine  from 
Persian,  chimpanzee  from  some  African,  and  tapir  from  some 
Brazilian  language.  It  is  characteristic  of  all  words  of  this  kind 
that  only  a  few  of  them  are  taken  from  each  foreign  language, 
and  that  they  have  nearly  all  of  them  gone  the  round  of  all 
civilized  languages,  so  that  they  are  now  known  practically  all 
over  the  world. 

Other  loan-words  form  larger  groups  and  bear  witness  to  the 
cultural  superiority  of  some  nation  in  some  one  specified  sphere 
of  activity  or  branch  of  knowledge  :  such  are  the  Arabic  words 
relating  to  mathematics  and  astronomy  {algebra,  zero,  cipher,  ^ 
azimuth,  zenith,  in  related  fields  turiff,  alkali,  alcohol),  the  Italian 
words  relating  to  music  {piano,  allegro,  andante,  solo,  soprano, 
etc.)  and  commerce  {bank,  bankrupt,  balance,  traffic,  ducat,  florin) 
— one  need  not  accumulate  examples,  as  everybody  interested  in 
the  subject  of  this  book  will  be  able  to  supply  a  great  many  from 
his  own  reading.  The  most  comprehensive  groups  of  this  kind 
are  those  French,  Latin  and  Greek  \7ords  that  have  flooded  the< 
M'hole  world  of  Western  civilization  from  the  Middle  Ages  and 
the  Renaissance  and  have  given  a  family-character  to  all  those 
parts  of  the  vocabularies  of  otherwise  different  languages  which 

14 


210  THE  FOREIGNER  [ch.  xi 

are  concerned  with  the  highest  intellectual  and  teclmical  activities. 
See  the  detailed  discussion  of  these  strata  of  loan-words  in  English 
in  GS  ch.  v  and  vi. 

When  one  nation  has  imbibed  for  centuries  the  cultural  influ- 
ence of  another,  its  language  may  have  become  so  infiltrated  with 
words  from  the  other  language  that  these  are  found  in  most  sen- 
tences, at  any  rate  in  nearly  every  sentence  deaUng  with  things 
above  the  simplest  material  necessities.  The  best-known  examples 
are  English  since  the  influx  of  French  and  classical  words,  and 
Turkish  with  its  wholesale  importations  from  Arabic.  Another 
example  is  Basque,  in  wliich  nearly  all  expressions  for  religious 
and  spiritual  ideas  are  Romanic.  Basque  is  naturally  very  poor 
in  words  for  general  ideas ;  it  has  names  for  special  kinds  of  trees, 
but  '  tree  '  is  arbolia,  from  Spanish  drhol,  '  animal '  is  animale, 
'  colour  '  colore,  '  plant '  planta  or  landare,  '  flower  '  lore  or  lili, 
'  thing  '  gauza,  '  time  '  dembora.  Thus  also  many  of  its  names 
for  utensils  and  garments,  weights  and  measures,  arms,  etc.,  arc 
borrowed  ;  '  king  '  is  errege,  '  law  '  lege,  lage,  '  master  '  maisu, 
etc.     (See  Zs.  J.  roman.  Phil,  17.  140  fl.) 

In  a  great  many  cases  linguistic  borrowing  must  be  considered 
a  necessity,  but  this  is  not  alwaj's  so.  When  a  nation  has  once 
got  into  the  habit  of  borrowing  words,  people  will  very  often  use 
foreign  words  where  it  would  have  been  2:)erfectly  possible  to  ex- 
press their  ideas  by  means  of  native  speech-material,  the  reason 
for  going  out  of  one's  own  language  being  in  some  cases  the  desire  to 
/  be  thought  fashionable  or  refined  through  interlarding  one's  speech 
with  foreign  words,  in  others  simply  laziness,  as  is  very  often  the 
case  when  people  are  rendering  thoughts  they  have  heard  or  read 
in  a  foreign  tongue.  Translators  are  responsible  for  the  great 
majority  of  these  intrusive  words,  which  might  have  been  avoided 
by  a  resort  to  native  composition  or  derivation,  or  very  often  by 
turning  the  sentence  a  little  differently  from  the  foreign  text. 
The  most  thoroughgoing  speech  mixtures  are  due  much  less  to 
real  race-mixture  than  to  continued  cultural  contact,  especially 
of  a  literary  character,  as  is  seen  very  clearly  in  English,  where 
the  Romanic  element  is  only  to  a  very  small  extent  referable  to 
the  Norman  conquerors,  and  far  more  to  the  peaceful  relations 
of  the  following  centuries.  That  Greek  and  Latin  words  have 
come  in  through  the  medium  of  literature  hardlj'  needs  sajdng. 
Many  of  these  words  are  superfluous  :  "  The  native  words  cold, 
cool,  chilly,  icy,  frosty,  might  have  seemed  sufiicient  for  all  pur- 
poses, without  any  necessity  for  importing  frigid,  gelid  and  algid, 
which,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  are  found  neither  in  Shakespeare  nor 
in  the  Authorized  Version  of  the  Bible  nor  in  the  poetical  works 
of  Milton,  Pope,  Cowper  and  Shelley  "  (GS  §  136).      But  on  the 


§10]       GENERAL   THEORY    OF   LOAN- WORDS        211 

other  hand  it  cannot  be  denied  that  the  imported  words  have  in 
many  instances  enriched  the  language  through  enabling  its  users 
to  obtain  greater  variety  and  to  find  expressions  for  many  subtle 
shades  of  thought.  The  question  of  the  value  of  loan-words  can- 
not be  dismissed  offhand,  as  the  '  purists  '  in  many  countries  are 
inclined  to  imagine,  with  the  dictum  that  foreign  words  should  be 
shunned  like  the  plague,  but  requires  for  its  solution  a  careful 
consideration  of  the  merits  and  demerits  of  each  separate  foreign 
term  viewed  in  connexion  with  the  native  resources  for  expressing 
that  particular  idea. 


XI.— §  11.  Classes  of  Loan-wor5s. 

It  is  quite  natural  that  there  should  be  a  much  greater  inclina- 
tion everywhere  to  borrow  "  full  '  words  (substantives,  adjectives, 
notional  verbs)  than  '  empty '  words  (pronouns,  prepositions, 
conjunctions,  auxiliary  verbs),  to  which  class  most  of  the  '  gram- 
matical '  words  belong.  But  there  is  no  hard-and-fast  limit  between 
the  two  classes.  It  is  rare  for  a  language  to  take  such  words  as 
numerals  from  another  language  ;  j-et  examples  are  found  here 
and  there — thus,  in  connexion  with  special  games,  etc.  Until 
comparatively  recenth%  dicers  and  backgammon-players  counted 
in  England  by  means  of  the  French  words  ace,  deuce,  tray,  cater, 
cinque,  size,  and  with  the  English  game  of  lawn  tennis  the  English 
way  of  counting  (fifteen  love,  etc.)  has  been  lately  adoj)ted  in 
Russia  and  to  some  extent  also  in  Denmark.  In  some  parts  of 
England  Welsh  numerals  were  until  comparatively  recent  times 
used  in  the  counting  of  sheep.  Cattle-drivers  in  Jutland  used  to 
count  from  20  to  90  in  Low  German  learnt  in  Hamburg  and  Holstein, 
where  they  sold  their  cattle.  In  this  case  the  clumsiness  and  want 
of  perspicuity  of  the  Danish  expressions  {halvtredsindstyve  for  Low 
German  fofdix,  etc.)  may  have  been  one  of  the  reasons  for  preferring 
the  German  words  ;  in  the  same  way  the  clumsiness  of  the  Eskimo 
way  of  counting  ("  third  toe  on  the  second  foot  of  the  fourth  man," 
etc.)  has  favoured  the  introduction  into  Greenlandic  of  the  Danish 
words  for  100  and  1,000  :  with  an  Eskimo  ending,  tintritigdlit  and 
tusintigdlit.  Most  Japanese  numerals  are  Chinese.  And  of  course 
million  and  milliard  are  used  in  most  civilized  countries. 

Prepositions,  too,  are  rarely  borrowed  bj'  one  language  from 
another.  Yet  the  Latin  (Ital.)  per  is  used  in  English,  German 
and  Danish,  and  the  French  a  in  the  two  latter  languages,  and  both 
are  extending  their  domain  beyond  the  commercial  language  in 
which  they  were  first  used.  The  Greek  kata,  at  first  also  commercial, 
has  in  Spanish  found  admission  into  the  ordinary  language  and 
has  become  the  pronoun  cada  '  each.' 


212  THE  FOREIGNER  [ch.  xi 

Personal  and  demonstrative  pronouns,  articles  and  the  like  are 
scarcely  over  taken  over  from  one  language  to  another.  They  are 
so  definitely  woven  into  the  innermost  texture  of  a  language  that 
no  one  would  think  of  giving  them  up,  however  much  he  might 
like  to  adorn  his  speech  with  words  from  a  foreign  source.  If, 
therefore,  in  one  instance  we  find  a  case  of  a  language  borrowing 
words  of  this  kind,  we  are  justified  in  thinking  that  exceptional 
causes  must  have  been  at  work,  and  such  really  proves  to  be  the 
case  in  English,  which  has  adopted  the  Scandinavian  forms  they, 
them,  their.  It  is  usual  to  speak  of  English  as  being  a  mixture  of 
native  Old  English  ('  Anglo-Saxon  ')  and  French,  but  as  a  matter 
of  fact  the  French  influence,  powerful  as  it  is  in  the  vocabulary 
and  patent  as  it  is  to  the  eyes  of  everybody,  is  superficial  in  com- 
parison with  the  influence  exercised  in  a  much  subtler  way  by  the 
Scandinavian  settlers  in  the  North  of  England.  The  French 
influence  is  different  in  extent,  but  not  in  kind,  from  the  French 
influence  on  German  or  the  old  Gothonic  influence  on  Finnic  ; 
it  is  perhaps  best  compared  with  the  German  influence  on  Danish 
in  the  Middle  Ages.  But  the  Scandinavian  influence  on  English 
is  of  a  different  kind.  The  number  of  Danish  and  Norwegian 
settlers  in  England  must  have  been  very  large,  as  is  shown  by 
the  number  of  Scandinavian  place-names  ;  yet  that  does  not 
account  for  everything.  A  most  important  factor  was  the  great 
similarity  of  the  two  languages,  in  spite  of  numerous  points  of 
difference.  Accordingly'' ,  when  their  fighting  was  over,  the  invaders 
and  the  original  population  would  to  some  extent  be  able  to  make 
themselves  understood  by  one  another,  like  people  talking  two 
dialects  of  the  same  language,  or  like  students  from  Copenhagen 
and  from  Lund  nowadays.  Many  of  the  most  common  words 
were  absolutely  identical,  and  others  differed  only  slightly.  Hence 
it  comes  that  in  the  Middle  English  texts  we  find  a  great  many 
double  forms  of  the  same  word,  one  English  and  the  other  Scandi- 
navian, used  side  by  side,  some  of  these  doublets  even  surviving 
till  the  present  day,  though  now  differentiated  in  sense  (e.g.  whole, 
hale  ;  no,  nay  ;  from,  fro  ;  shirt,  shirt),  while  in  other  cases  one 
only  of  the  two  forms,  either  the  native  or  the  Scandinavian,  has 
survived  ;  thus  the  Scandinavian  sister  and  egg  have  ousted  the 
English  sweostor  and  ey.  We  find,  therefore,  a  great  many  words 
adopted  of  a  kind  not  usually  borrowed  ;  thus,  everyday  verbs  and 
adjectives  like  take,  call,  hit,  die,  ill,  ugly,  wrong,  and  among  sub- 
stantives such  non-technical  ones  as  fellow,  sky,  skin,  wing,  etc. 
(For  details  see  my  GS  ch.  iv.)  All  this  indicates  an  intimate  fusion 
of  the  two  races  and  of  the  two  languages,  such  as  is  not  provided 
for  in  any  of  the  classes  described  by  Hempl  (above,  §  8).  In 
most  speech-mixtures  the  various  elements  remain  distinct  and  can 


§11]  CLASSES   OF   LOAN-WORDS  213 

be  separated,  just  as  after  shuffling  a  pack  of  cards  you  can  pick 
out  the  hearts,  spades,  etc.  ;  but  in  the  case  of  English  and  Scandi- 
navian we  have  a  subtler  and  more  intimate  fusion,  very  much 
as  when  you  put  a  lump  of  sugar  into  a  cup  of  tea  and  a  few  minutes 
afterwards  are  quite  unable  to  say  which  is  tea  and  which  is  sugar. 

XI.— §  12.  Influence  on  Grammar. 

The  question  has  often  been  raised  whether  speech-mixture 
affects  the  grammar  of  a  language  wliich  has  borrowed  largely 
from  some  other  language.  The  older  view  is  expressed  pointedly 
by  Whitney  (L  199)  :  "  Such  a  thing  as  a  language  with  a  mixed 
grammatical  apparatus  has  never  come  under  the  cognizance  of 
linguistic  students  :  it  ^\  ould  be  to  them  a  monstrosity  ;  it  seems 
an  impossibility."  This  is  an  exaggeration,  and  cannot  be  justified, 
for  the  simple  reason  that  the  vocabulary  of  a  language  and  its 
'  grammatical  apparatus  '  cannot  be  nicely  separated  in  the  way 
presupposed  :  indeed,  much  of  the  borrowed  material  mentioned 
in  our  last  paragraphs  does  belong  to  the  grammatical  apparatus. 
But  there  is,  of  course,  some  truth  in  Whitney's  dictum.  When 
a  word  is  borrowed  it  is  not  as  a  rule  taken  over  with  all  the  elaborate 
flexion  which  may  belong  to  it  in  its  original  home  ;  as  a  rule, 
one  form  only  is  adopted,  it  may  be  the  nominative  or  some  other 
case  of  a  noun,  the  infinitive  or  the  present  or  the  naked  stem  of 
a  verb.  This  form  is  then  either  used  unchanged  or  with  the  end- 
ings of  the  adopting  language,  generally  those  of  the  most  '  regular  ' 
declension  or  conjugation.  It  is  an  exceptional  case  when  more 
than  one  flexional  form  is  taken  over,  and  this  case  does  not  occur 
in  really  popular  loans.  In  learned  usage  we  find  in  older  Danish 
such  case-flexion  as  gen.  Christi,  dat.  Christo,  by  the  side  of  nom. 
Christus,  also,  e.g.,  i  theatro,  and  still  sometimes  in  German  we 
have  the  same  usage  :  e.g.  mit  den  pronominibus.  In  a  somewhat 
greater  number  of  instances  the  plural  form  is  adopted  as  well  as 
the  singular  form,  as  in  English  fu7igi,  formulce,  phenomena,  sera- 
pJiim,  etc.,  but  the  natural  tendency  is  always  towards  using  the 
native  endings,  funguses,  formulas,  etc.,  and  this  has  prevailed  in 
all  popular  words,  e.g.  ideas,  circuses,  museums.  As  the  formation 
of  cases,  tenses,  etc.,  in  different  languages  is  often  very  irregular, 
and  the  distinctive  marks  are  often  so  intimately  connected  with 
the  kernel  of  the  word  and  so  unsubstantial  as  not  to  be  easily 
distinguished,  it  is  quite  natural  that  no  one  should  think  of 
borrowing  such  endings,  etc.,  and  applying  them  to  native  words. 
Schuchardt  once  thought  that  the  English  genitive  ending  s  had 
been  adopted  into  Indo-Portuguese  (in  the  East  Indies),  where  gober- 
nadors  casa  stands  for  '  governor's  house,'  but  he  now  explains  the 


214  THE  FOREIGNER  [ch.  xi 

form  more  correctly  as  originating  in  the  possessive  pronoun  su : 
gobernaclor  su  casa  (clem  g.  sein  haus,  Sitzungsber.  der  preuss. 
Akademie,  1917,  524). 

It  was  at  one  time  commonly  held  that  the  English  plural 
ending  s,  Mhich  in  Old  English  was  restricted  in  its  application, 
owes  its  extension  to  the  influence  of  French.  This  theory,  I  believe, 
was  finally  disposed  of  by  the  six  decisive  arguments  I  brought 
forAvard  against  it  in  1891  (reprinted  in  ChE  §  39).  But  after  what 
has  been  said  above  on  the  Scandinavian  influence,  I  incline  to  think 
that  E.  Classen  is  right  in  thinking  that  the  Danes  count  for  some- 
thing in  bringing  about  the  final  victory  of  -s  over  its  competitor 
-n,  for  the  Danes  had  no  plural  in  -n,  and  -s  reminded  them  of 
their  own  -r  {Mod.  Language  Rev.  14.  94  ;  cf.  also  -s  in  the  third 
person  of  verbs,  Scand.  -r).  Apart  from  this  particular  point, 
it  is  quite  natural  that  the  Scandinavians  should  have  exercised 
a  general  levelling  influence  on  the  English  language,  as  many 
niceties  of  grammar  would  easily  be  sacrificed  where  mutual  in- 
telligibility was  so  largely  brought  about  by  the  common  vocabu- 
lary. Accordingly,  we  find  that  in  the  regions  in  which  the  Danish 
settlements  were  thickest  the  wearing  away  of  grammatical  forms 
was  a  couple  of  centuries  in  advance  of  the  same  process  in  the 
southern  parts  of  the  country. 

Derivative  endings  certainly  belong  to  the  '  grammatical 
apparatus  '  of  a  language  ;  yet  many  such  endings  have  been 
taken  over  into  another  language  as  parts  of  borrowed  words 
and  have  then  been  freely  combined  with  native  speech-material. 
The  phenomenon  is  extremely  frequent  in  English,  where  Ave  have, 
for  instance,  the  Romanic  endings  -ess  {shepherdess,  seeress),  -ment 
{endearment,  bewilderment),  -age  {mileage,  cleavage,,  shortage),  -ance 
{hindrance,  forbearance)  and  many  more.  In  Danish  and  German 
the  number  of  similar  instances  is  much  more  restricted,  yet  we 
have,  for  instance,  recent  words  in  -isme,  -ismns  and  -ianer ;  cf. 
also  older  words  like  bageri,  bdckerei,  etc.  It  is  the  same  with  pre- 
fixes :  English  has  formed  many  words  with  de-,  co-,  inter-,  pre-, 
anli-  and  other  classical  prefixes  :  de-anglicize,  co-godfather,  inter- 
marriage, at  pre-war  prices,  anti-slavery,  etc.  (quotations  in  my 
GS  §  124 ;  cf .  MEG  ii.  14.  66).  Ex-  has  established  itself  in  many 
languages :  ex-king,  ex-roi,  ex-konge,  ex-kdnig,  etc.  In  Danish 
the  prefix  be-,  borrowed  from  German,  is  used  very  extensively 
with  native  words  :  bebrejde,  bebo,  bebygge,  and  tliis  is  not  the  only 
German  prefix  that  is  productive  in  the  Scandinavian  languages. 

With  regard  to  syntax,  very  little  can  be  said  except  in  a 
general  way  :  languages  certainly  do  influence  each  other  syn- 
tactically, and  those  who  knoAv  a  foreign  language  only  imper- 
fectly are  apt  to  transfer  to  it  methods  of  construction  from  their 


§12]  INFLUENCE    ON    GRAMMAR  215 

own  tongue.  Many  instances  of  this  have  been  collected  by 
Sehuchardt,  SID.  But  it  is  doubtful  whether  these  syntactical 
influences  have  the  same  permanent  effects  on  any  language  as  tho.se 
exerted  on  one's  own  language  by  the  habit  of  translating  foreign 
works  into  it :  in  this  purely  literary  way  a  great  many  idioms 
and  turns  of  phrases  have  been  introduced  into  English,  German 
and  the  Scandinavian  languages  from  French  and  Latin,  and  into 
Danish  and  Swedish  from  German.  The  accusative  and  infinitive 
construction,  which  had  only  a  very  restricted  use  in  Old  English, 
has  very  considerably  extended  its  domain  through  Latin  influence, 
and  the  so-called  '  absolute  construction  '  (in  my  own  grammatical 
terminology  called  '  duplex  subjunct  ')  seems  to  be  entirely  due  to 
imitation  of  Latin  syntax.  In  the  Balkan  tongues  there  are  some 
interesting  instances  of  sjTitactical  agreement  between  various 
languages,  which  must  be  due  to  oral  influence  through  the  neces- 
sity imposed  on  border  peoples  of  passing  continually  from  one 
language  to  another  :  the  infinitive  has  disappeared  from  Greek, 
Rumanian  and  Albanian,  and  the  definite  article  is  placed  after 
the  substantive  in  Rumanian,  Albanian  and  Bulgarian. 

XI.— §  13.  Translation-loans. 

Besides  direct  borrowings  we  have  also  indirect  borro^^ings  or 
'  translation  loan-words,'  words  modelled  more  or  less  closely  on 
foreign  ones,  though  consisting  of  native  speech-material.  I  take 
some  examples  from  the  very  full  and  able  paper  "  Notes  sur  les 
Caiques  Lingiiistiques  "  contributed  by  Kr.  Sandfeld  to  the  Fest- 
schrift Vilh.  Thomsen,  1912  :  cedificatio :  G.  erbauung,  Dan. 
opbyggelse  ;  ceqmlibrium  :  G.  gleichgewicht,  Dan.  ligevsegt ;  bene- 
ficium  :  G.  wohltat,  Dan.  velgerning  ;  conscientia  :  Goth,  mij'wissi, 
G.  gewissen,  Dan.  samvittighed,  Swed.  samvete,  Russ.  soznanie  ; 
omnipoteyis  :  E.  almighty,  G.  allmachtig,  Dan.  almsegtig  ;  arriere- 
2}ensee  :  hintergedanke,  bagtanke  ;  bien-Ure  :  wohlsein,  velva?re  ; 
exposition :  austellung,  udstilling ;  etc.  Sandfeld  gives  manj'' 
more  examples,  and  as  he  has  in  most  instances  been  able  to  give 
also  corresponding  words  from  various  Slavonic  languages  as  well 
as  from  jMagyar,  Finnic,  etc.,  he  rightly  concludes  that  his  collec- 
tions serve  to  throw  light  on  that  community  in  thought  and  ex- 
pression which  Bally  has  well  termed  "  la  mentalite  europeenne." 
(But  it  will  be  seen  that  English  differs  from  most  European  lan- 
guages in  having  a  much  greater  propensity  to  swallowing  foreign 
words  raw,  as  it  were,  than  to  translating  them.) 


CHAPTER   XII 
PIDGIN    AND    CONGENERS 

§  1.  Beacli-la-Mar.  §  2.  Grammar.  §  3.  Sounds.  §  4.  Pidgin.  §  5.  Grammar, 
etc.  §  0.  General  Theory.  §  7.  Mauritius  Creole.  §  8.  Chinook  Jar- 
gon. §9.  Chinook  continued.  §10.  Makeshift  Languages.  §11. 
Romanic  Languages. 

XII.— §  1.  Beach-la-Mar. 

As  a  first  typical  example  of  a  whole  class  of  languages  now 
found  in  manj^  j)arts  of  the  world  where  people  of  European 
civilization  have  come  into  contact  with  men  of  other  races,  we 
may  take  the  so-called  Beach-la-mar  (or  Beche-le-mar,  or  Beche 
de  mer  English)  ;  ^  it  is  also  sometimes  called  Sandalwood 
English.  It  is  spoken  and  understood  all  over  the  Western 
Pacific,  its  spread  being  largely  due  to  the  fact  that  the  practice 
of  '  blackbirding  '  often  brought  together  on  the  same  plantation 
many  natives  from  different  islands  with  mutually  incompre- 
hensible languages,  whose  only  means  of  communication  was 
the  broken  English  they  had  picked  up  from  the  whites.  And 
now  the  natives  learn  this  language  from  each  other,  while 
in  many  places  the  few  Europeans  have  to  learn  it  from  the 
islanders.  "  Thus  the  native  use  of  Pidgin-English  la3's  down 
the  rules  by  which  the  Europeans  let  themselves  be  guided  when 
learning  it.  Even  Englishmen  do  not  find  it  quite  easy  at  the 
beginning  to  understand  Pidgin-English,  and  have  to  learn  it 
before  they  are  able  to  speak  it  properly  "  (Landtman). 

*  The  etymology  of  this  name  is  rather  curious :  Portuguese  bidio  de  m<xr, 
from  bicho  'worm.'  the  name  of  the  sea  slug  or  trepang,  which  is  eaten  as  a 
luxury  by  the  Chinese,  was  in  French  modified  into  beche  dc  mer,  'sea- 
spade  ' ;  this  b}'  a  second  popular  et\'mology  was  made  into  English 
beach-la-mar  as  if  a  compound  of  beach. 

My  sources  are  H.  Schuchardt,  KS  v.  (Wiener  Academic,  1883)  ;  id.  in 
ESt  xiii.  158  ff.,  1889;  W.  Churchill,  Beach-la-Mar,  the  Jargon  or  Trade 
Speech  of  the  Western  Pacific  (Carnfgie  Institution  of  Washington,  1911); 
Jack  London,  The  Cruise  of  the  Snark  (Mills  &  Boon,  London,  1911  ?), 
G.  Landtman  in  Neuphilologischc  Mitlleilungen  (Helsingfors,  1918,  p.  62  fi. 
Landtman  calls  it  "  the  Pidgin-English  of  British  New  Guinea,"  where  he 
learnt  it,  though  it  really  differs  from  Pidgin-English  proper  ;  see  below)  ; 
*'  The  Jargon  English  of  Torres  Straits "  in  Reports  of  the  Cambridge 
Anthropological  Expedition  to  Torres  Straits,  vol.  iii.  p.  25  1  ff.,  Cambridge, 
1907. 

216 


§1]  BEACH-LA-MAR  217 

I  shall  now  try  to  give  some  idea  of  the  structure  of  this 
lingo. 

The  vocabulary  is  nearly  all  English.  Even  most  of  the 
words  which  ultimately  go  back  to  other  languages  have  been 
admitted  only  because  the  English  with  whom  the  islanders  were 
thrown  into  contact  had  previously  adopted  them  into  their  own 
speech,  so  that  the  islanders  Mere  justified  in  believing  that  they 
were  really  English.  This  is  true  of  the  Spanish  or  Portuguese 
savvy,  'to  know/  and  inckaninny,  'child'  or  'little  one'  (a 
favourite  in  manj'  languages  on  account  of  its  symbolic  sound ; 
see  Ch.  XX  §  8),  as  well  as  the  Amerindian  tomahawk,  which  in  the 
whole  of  Australia  is  the  usual  word  for  a  small  axe.  And  if  we 
find  in  Beach-la-mar  the  two  Maori  words  tajm  or  taboo  and 
kai,  or  more  often  kaikai,  '  to  eat '  or  '  food,'  thej-  have  probably 
got  into  the  language  through  English — we  know  that  both  are 
very  extensively  used  in  Australia,  while  the  former  is  known  all 
over  the  civilized  world.  Likkilik  or  liklik,  '  small,  almost,'  is  said 
to  be  from  a  Polynesian  word  liki,  but  may  be  really  a  perversion 
of  Engl,  little.  Landtman  gives  a  few  words  from  unknown 
languages  used  by  the  Kiwais,  though  not  derived  from  their 
own  language.  The  rest  of  the  words  found  in  my  sources  are 
English,  though  not  alwaj's  pure  English,  in  so  far  as  their 
signification  is  often  curiously  distorted. 

Nusipepa  means  '  a  letter,  any  written  or  printed  document,' 
mary  is  the  general  term  for  'woman  '  (of,  above,  p.  118),  j^isupo 
(peasoup)  for  all  foreign  foods  which  are  preserved  in  tins  ; 
squareface,  the  sailor's  name  for  a' square  gin-bottle,  is  extended 
to  all  forms  of  glassware,  no  matter  what  the  shape.  One  of 
the  earliest  seafarers  is  said  to  have  left  a  bull  and  a  cow  on  one 
of  the  islands  and  to  have  mentioned  these  two  words  together  ; 
the  natives  took  them  as  one  word,  and  now  hullamacow  or  p^du- 
makau  means  '  cattle,  beef,  also  tinned  beef '  ;  pulomokau  is 
now  given  as  a  native  word  in  a  dictionary  of  the  Fijian 
language.^  Bulopenn,  which  means  '  ornament,'  is  said  to  be 
nothing  but  the  English  blue  paint.  All  this  shows  the  purely 
accidental  character  of  many '  of  the  linguistic  acquisitions  of 
the  Polynesians. 

As  the  vocabulary  is  extremely  limited,  composite  expres- 
sions are  sometimes  resorted  to  in  order  to  express  ideas  for 
which  we  have  simple  words,  and  not  unfrequentlj'"  the  devices 
used  appear  to  us  very  clumsy  or  even  comical.  A  piano  is 
called    '  big  fellow  bokus   (box)    you   fight  him  he  cry,'   and    a 

^  Similarly  the  missionary  Q.  Brown  thought  that  tobi  was  a  native 
word  of  the  Duke  of  York  Islands  for  '  wash,'  till  one  day  he  accidentally 
discovered  that  it  was  their  pronunciation  of  English  soap. 


218  PIDGIN  AND  CONGENERS  [cH.  xii 

concertina  '  little  fellow  bokus  you  shove  him  he  cry,  you  pull 
him  he  cit.'  Womati  he  got  Jaminil  {'family')  inside  means 
'she  is  with  child.'  Inside  is  also  used  extensively  about  mental 
states  :  jump  inside  '  be  startled,'  inside  tell  himself  '  to  con- 
sider,' inside  bad  '  grieved  or  sorry,'  feel  inside  '  to  know,'  feel 
another  kind  inside  '  to  change  one's  mind.'  3hj  throat  he  fast 
'  I  was  dumb.'  He  took  daylight  a  long  time  '  lay  awake.'  Bring 
fellow  belong  make  open  bottle  '  bring  me  a  corkscrew.'  Water 
belong  stink  '  perfumery,'  The  idea  of  being  bald  is  thus  ex- 
pressed :  grass  belong  head  belong  him  all  he  die  finish,  or  with 
another  variant,  coconut  belong  him.  grass  no  sfojy,  for  coconut  is 
taken  from  English  slang  in  the  sense  '  head  '  (Schuchardt  has 
the  sentence  :  You  no  savvy  that  fellow  white  man  coconut  belong 
him  no  grass  ?).  For  '  feather '  the  combination  grass  belong 
pigeon  is  used,  pigeon  being  a  general  term  for  any  bird. 

A  man  who  wanted  to  borrow  a  saw,  the  word  for  which  he 
had  forgotten,  said  :  '  You  give  me  brother  belong  tomahawk, 
he  come  he  go.'  A  servant  who  had  been  to  Queensland,  where 
he  saw  a  train,  on  his  return  called  it  '  steamer  he  walk  about 
along  bush.'  Natives  who  watched  Landtman  when  he  en- 
closed letters  in  envelopes  named  the  latter  '  house  belong  letter.' 
Many  of  these  expressions  are  thus  picturesque  descriptions  made 
on  the  spur  of  the  moment  if  the  proper  word  is  not  known. 


Xn.— §2.  Grammar. 

These  phrases  have  already  illustrated  some  points  of  the 
very  simple  grammar  of  this  lingo.  Words  have  only  one  form, 
and  what  is  in  our  language  expressed  by  flexional  forms  is 
either  left  unexpressed  or  else  indicated  by  auxiliary  words. 
The  plural  of  nouns  is  like  the  singular  (though  the  form  men 
is  found  in  my  texts  alongside  of  man)  ;  when  necessary,  the 
plural  is  indicated  by  means  of  a  prefixed  all :  all  he  talk  '  they 
say  '  (also  him  fellow  all  '  they  ')  ;  all  man  '  everj'^body  '  ;  a  more 
indefinite  plural  is  plenty  man  or  full  up  man.  For  '  we  '  is 
said  me  two  fella  or  me  three  fellow,  as  the  case  may  be  ;  me  two 
fellow  Lagia  means  '  I  and  Lagia.'  If  there  are  more,  me 
altogether  man  or  me  plenty  man  may  be  said,  though  we  is  also 
in  use.  Fellow  [fella]  is  a  much-vexed  word  ;  it  is  required,  or 
at  any  rate  often  used,  after  most  pronouns,  thus,  that  fellow  hat, 
this  fellow  knife,  me  fellow,  you  fellow,  him  fellow  (not  he  fellow)  ; 
it  is  found  very  often  after  an  adjective  and  seems  to  be  required 
to  prop  up  the  adjective  before  the  substantive :  big  fellotv 
name,  big  felloio  tobacco,  another  fellow  man.  In  other  cases  no 
fellow  is  used,  and  it  seems  difficult  to  give  definite  rules  ;    after 


§2]  GRAMMAR  219 

a  numeral  it  is  frequent :  two  fellow  men  {man  ?),  three  fellow 
bottle.  There  is  a  curious  employment  in  ten  fellow  ten  one 
fellow,  which  means  101.  It  is  used  adverbially  in  that  man  he 
cry  big  felloiv  '  he  cries  loudly.' 

The  genitive  is  expressed  by  means  of  belong  (or  belong-a, 
long,  along),  which  also  serves  for  other  prepositional  relations. 
Examples  :  tail  belong  him,  pappa  belong  me,  wife  belong  you, 
belly  belong  me  walk  about  too  much  (I  was  seasick),  me  savvee  talk 
along  white  man ;  rope  along  bush  means  liana.  Missis !  man 
belong  bullamacoiv  him  stop  (the  butcher  has  come).  What  for 
you  wipe  hands  belong-a  you  on  clothes  belong  esseppoon  ?  (spoon, 
i.e.  napkin).  Cf.  above  the  expressions  for  '  bald.'  Piccaninny 
belong  banana  '  a  yoimg  b.  plant.'  Belong  also  naturally  means 
'  to  live  in,  be  a  native  of  '  ;  boy  belong  island,  he  belong  Burri- 
burrigan.  The  preposition  along  is  used  about  many  local  rela- 
tions (in,  at,  on,  into,  on  board).  From  such  combinations  as 
laugh  along  (1.  at)  and  he  speak  along  this  fella  the  transition  is 
easy  to  cases  in  which  alo7ig  serves  to  indicate  the  indirect 
object :  he  give'm  this  fella  Eve  along  Adam,  and  also  a  kind  of 
direct  object,  as  in  fight  alonga  him,  you  gammon  along  me  (deceive, 
lie  to  me),  and  with  the  form  belong :  he  puss-puss  belong  this 
fellow  {puss-puss  orig.  a  cat,  then  as  a  verb  to  caress,  make 
love  to). 

There  is  no  distinction  of  gender  :  that  woman  he  brother  belong 
me  =  '  she  is  my  sister  '  ;  he  (before  the  verb)  and  him  (in  all 
other  positions)  serve  both  for  he,  she  and  it.  There  is  a 
curious  use  of  'm,  um  or  em,  in  our  texts  often  written  him,  after 
a  verb  as  a  '  vocal  sign  of  warning  that  an  object  of  the  verb  is 
to  follow,'  no  matter  what  that  object  is. 

Churchill  says  that  "  in  the  adjective  comparison  is  un- 
known ;  the  islanders  do  not  know  how  to  think  comparatively — 
at  least,  they  lack  the  form  of  Avords  by  which  comparison  may 
be  indicated  ;  this  big,  that  small  is  the  nearest  they  can  come 
to  the  expression  of  the  idea  that  one  thing  is  greater  than 
another."  But  Landtman  recognizes  more  big  and  also  more 
better :  '  no  good  make  him  that  fashion,  more  better  make 
him  all  same.'  The  same  double  comparative  I  find  in  another 
place,  used  as  a  kind  of  verb  meaning  '  ought  to,  had  better '  : 
more  better  you  come  out.  Too  simply  means  '  much  '  :  he  savvy 
too  much  '  he  knows  much  '  (praise,  no  blame),  he  too  much  talk. 
A  synonjon  is  plenty  too  much.  Schuchardt  gives  the  explanation 
of  this  trait :  "  The  white  man  was  the  teacher  of  the  black 
man,  who  imitated  his  manner  of  speaking.  But  the  former 
would  constantly  use  the  strongest  expressions  and  exaggerate 
in  a  manner  that  he  would  only  occasionally  resort  to  in  speaking 


220  PIDGIN  AND  CONGENERS  [ch.  xii 

to  his  own  countrymen.  He  did  not  say,  '  You  are  very  lazy,' 
but  '  You  are  too  lazy,'  and  this  will  account  for  the  fact  that 
'  very  '  is  called  too  much  in  Beach-la-mar  as  well  as  tumussi 
in   the   Negro-English   of   Surinam "    {Spr.   der  Saramakkaneger, 

p.  iv). 

Verbs  have  no  tense-forms  ;  when  required,  a  future  may 
be  indicated  by  means  of  by  and  by  :  brother  belong-a-me  by 
and  by  he  dead  (my  br.  is  dying),  bymby  all  men  lavgh  along  that 
boy  ;  he  small  now,  bymbye  he  big.  It  may  be  qualified  by 
additions  like  bymby  one  time,  bymby  little  bit,  bymby  big  bit,  and 
may  be  used  also  of  the  '  postpreterit '  (of  futurity  relative  to  a 
past  time)  :  by  and  by  boy  belong  island  he  speak.  Another  way  of 
expressing  the  future  is  seen  in  that  woynan  he  dose  np  born  (!) 
him  piccaninny  '  that  woman  will  shortly  give  birth  to  a  child.' 
The  usual  sign  of  the  perfect  is  been,  the  only  idiomatic  form  of 
the  verb  to  be  :  you  been  take  me  alotuj  three  year  ;  I  been  look 
round  before.  But  finish  may  also  be  used  :  7ne  look  him  finish 
(I  have  seen  him),  he  kaikai  all  finish  (he  has  eaten  it  all  up). 

Where  we  should  expect  forms  of  the  verb  '  to  be,'  there  is 
either  no  verb  or  else  stop  is  used  :  no  water  stop  (there  is  no 
water),  rain  he  slop  (it  rains),  iivo  white  men  stoj)  Matupi  (live  in), 
other  day  plenty  money  he  stop  (  .  .  .  I  had  .  .  .  ).  For  '  have  ' 
they  say  got.  My  belly  no  got  kaikai  (I  am  hungry),  he  got  good 
hand  (is  skilful). 


XII.— §3.  Sounds. 

About  the  phonetic  structure  of  Beach-la-mar  I  have  very 
little  information  ;  as  a  rule  the  words  in  my  sources  are  spelt 
in  the  usual  English  Avay.  Churchill  speaks  in  rather  vague  terms 
about  difficulties  which  the  islanders  experience  in  imitating  the 
English  sounds,  and  especially  groups  of  consonants :  "  Any 
English  word  which  on  experiment  proved  impracticable  to  the 
islanders  has  undergone  alteration  to  bring  it  within  the  scope 
of  their  familiar  range  of  sounds  or  has  been  rejected  for  some 
facile  sjaionym."  Thus,  according  to  him,  the  conjunction  if 
could  not  be  used  on  account  of  the  /,  and  that  is  the  reason 
for  the  constant  use  of  suppose  {s'pose,  pose,  posum  =  s'pose 
him) — but  it  may  be  allowable  to  doubt  this,  for  as  a  matter  of 
fact  /  occurs  very  frequently  in  the  language — for  instance,  in  the 
well-worn  words  fellow  and  finish.  Suppose  probably  is  pre- 
ferred to  if  because  it  is  fuller  in  form  and  less  abstract,  and  there- 
fore easier  to  handle,  while  the  islanders  have  many  occasions 
to  hear  it  in  other  combinations  than  those  in  which  it  is  an 
equivalent  of  the  conjunction. 


§  3]  SOUNDS  221 

Landtman  says  that  with  the  exception  of  a  few  sounds 
{j,  ch,  and  th  as  in  nothing)  the  Kiwai  Papuans  have  little  diffi- 
culty in  pronouncing  English  words. 

Schuchardt  gives  a  little  more  information  about  pronunci- 
ation, and  instances  esterrong  —  strong,  esseppoon=  spoon,  essauce- 
jien  —  saucep>an,  pellate  =  plate,  coverra  =  cover,  miUit  =  milk, 
bock-kiss  =  box  (in  Churchill  bokus,  bokkis)  as  mutilations  due 
to  the  native  speech  habits.  He  also  gives  the  following  letter 
from  a  native  of  the  New  Hebrides,  communicated  to  him  by 
R.  H.  Codrington  ;    it  shows  many  sound  substitutions  : 

3Iisi  Kamesi  Arelu  Joii  no  kaniu  ruki  mi  Mi  no  ruki  iou  Jou 
riiku  Mai  Poti  i  ko  Mae  tete  Vakaromala  mi  raiki  i  tiripi  Ausi 
p>arogi  ion  i  rukauti  Mai  Poti  mi  nomoa  kaikai  mi  angikele  nau 
Poti  mani  Mae  i  kivi  iou  Jamu  Vari  koti  iou  kivi  tamu  te  p>ci^o 
paraogi  mi  i  penesi  nomoa  te  Pako. 

Oloraiti  Ta,  Mataso. 

This  means  as  much  as  : 

Mr.  Comins,  (How)  are  you  ?  You  no  come  look  me  ;  me 
no  look  you  ;  you  look  my  boat  he  go  Mae  to-day.  Vakaromala 
me  like  he  sleep  house  belong  you,  he  look  out  my  boat,  me  no 
more  kaikai,  me  hungry  now,  boat  man  Mae  he  give  you  yam 
very  good,  you  give  some  tobacco  belong  (here  =  to)  me,  he 
finish,  no  more  tobacco. 

All  right  Ta,  Mataso. 

There  are  evidently  many  degrees  of  approximation  to  the 
true  English  sounds. 

This  letter  also  shows  the  characteristic  tendency  to  add  a 
vowel,  generally  a  short  i,  to  words  ending  in  consonants.  This 
is  old,  for  I  find  in  Defoe's  Farther  Adventures  of  Robinson  Crusoe 
(1719,  p.  211)  :  "  All  those  natives,  as  also  those  of  Africa,  when 
they  learn  English,  they  always  add  two  E's  at  the  end  of  the 
words  where  we  use  one,  and  make  the  accent  upon  them,  as 
makee,  takee  and  the  like."  (Note  the  un-phonetic  expressions  !) 
Landtman,  besides  this  addition,  as  in  belongey,  also  mentions 
a  more  enigmatic  one  of  lo  to  words  ending  in  vowels,  as  clylo  for 
'  cry  '  (cf.  below  on  Pidgin). 

Xn.— §  4.  Pidgin. 

I  now  turn  to  Pidgin-English.  As  is  well  known,  this  is  the 
name  of  the  jargon  which  is  very  extensively  used  in  China,  and 
to  some  extent  also  in  Japan  and  California,  as  a  means  of  com- 
munication   between    English-speaking    people    and    the    yellow 


222  PIDGIN  AND   CONGENERS  [cii.  xii 

population.  The  name  is  derived  from  the  Chinese  distortion 
of  the  Engl,  word  business.  Unfortunately,  the  sources  available 
for  ri(lgin-Engli.sh  as  actually  spoken  in  the  East  nowadays  are 
neither  so  full  nor  so  exact  as  those  for  Beach-la-mar,  and  the 
following  sketch,  therefore,  is  not  quite  satisfactory.^ 

Pidgin-English  must  have  developed  pretty  soon  after  the 
first  beginning  of  commercial  relations  between  the  English  and 
Chinese.  In  Engl.  Stiidien,  44.  298,  Prick  van  Wely  has  printed 
some  passages  of  C.  F.  Noble's  Voyafje  to  the  East  Indies  in  1747 
and  1748,  in  which  the  Chinese  are  represented  as  talking  to  the 
writer  in  a  "  broken  and  mixed  dialect  of  English  and  Portu- 
guese," the  specimens  given  corresponding  pretty  closely  to  the 
Pidgin  of  our  OAvn  days.  Thus,  he  no  cari  Chinamayi's  Joss,  hap 
oter  Joss,  which  is  rendered,  '  that  man  does  not  worship  our 
god,  but  has  another  god  '  ;  the  Chinese  are  said  to  be  unable  to 
pronounce  r  and  to  use  the  word  chin-chin  for  compliments  and 
jpickenini  for  '  small.' 

The  latter  word  seems  now  extinct  in  Pidgin  proper,  though 
we  have  met  it  in  Beach-la-mar,  but  Joss  is  still  very  frequent 
in  Pidgin  :  it  is  from  Portuguese  Deiis,  Deos  (or  Span.  Dios)  : 
Joss-house  is  a  temple  or  church,  Joss-pidgin  religion,  Joss-pidgin 
man  a  clergyman,  topside  Joss-pidgin  man  a  bishop.  Chin-chin, 
according  to  the  same  source,  is  from  Chinese  tsHng-ts'ing, 
Pekingese  ch'ing-ch'ing,  a  term  of  salutation  answering  to  '  thank 
you,  adieu,'  but  the  English  have  extended  its  sphere  of  appli- 
cation very  considerably,  using  it  as  a  noun  meaning  '  saluta- 
tion, compliment,'  and  as  a  verb  meaning  "  to  worship  (by  bow- 
ing and  striking  the  chin),  to  reverence,  adore,  implore,  to 
deprecate  anger,  to  wish  one  something,  invite,  ask  "  (Leland). 
The  explanation  given  here  within  parentheses  shows  how  the 
Chinese  word  has  been  interpreted  by  popular  etymology,  and 
no  doubt  it  owes  its  extensive  use  partly  to  its  sound,  which  has 
taken  the  popular  fancy.  Chin-chin  joss  means  religious  worship 
of  any  kind. 

Simpson  says  :  "  Many  of  the  words  in  use  are  of  unknown 
origin.     In  a  number  of  cases  the  English  suppose  them  to  be 

^  There  are  many  specimens  in  Charles  G.  Leland,  Pidgin- English  Sing- 
Song,  or  Songs  and  Stories  in  the  China-English  Dialect,  with  a  Vocabulary 
(5th  ed.,  London,  1900),  but  they  make  the  impression  of  being  artificially 
made-up  to  amuse  the  readers,  and  contain  a  much  larger  proportion  of 
Chinese  words  than  the  rest  of  my  sources  would  warrant.  Besides  various 
articles  in  newspapers  I  have  used  W.  Simpson,  "  China's  Future  Place  in 
Philology  "  (AlacmiUan's  Magazine,  November  1873)  and  Dr.  Legge's  article 
"  Pigeon  Englisli  "  in  Chajnbcrs's  Encyclopcedia.  1901  (s.v.  China).  The 
chapters  devoted  to  Pidgin  in  Karl  Lentzner's  Dictionary  of  the  Slang- 
English  of  Australia  and  of  some  Mixed  Languages  (Halle,  1892)  give  little  else 
but  wholesale  reprints  of  passages  from  some  of  the  sources  mentioned  above. 


§4]  PIDGIN  223 

Chinese,  Avhile  the  Chinese,  on  the  other  hand,  take  them  to  be 
English."'  Some  of  tliese,  liowcver,  admit  now  of  explanation, 
and  not  a  few  of  them  point  to  India,  where  the  ICnglish  have 
learnt  them  and  brought  them  further  East.  Thus  chit,  chitty, 
'  a  letter,  an  account,'  is  Hindustani  chitthl  ;  godoion  '  ware- 
house '  is  an  English  popular  interpretation  of  Malay  gadonrj, 
from  Tamil  gidangi.  Chowchow  seems  to  be  real  Chinese  and  to 
mean  '  mixed  preserves,'  but  in  Pidgin  it  has  acquired  the  vsider 
signification  of  '  food,  meal,  to  eat,'  besides  having  various  other 
applications  :  a  chowchow  cargo  is  an  assorted  cargo,  a  '  general 
shop  '  is  a  chowchow  shop.  Cumshaw  '  a  present '  is  Chinese. 
But  tiffin,  which  is  used  all  over  the  East  for  '  lunch,'  is  really 
an  English  word,  pro])erly  tiffing,  from  the  slang  verb  to  tiff,  to 
drink,  esp.  to  drink  out  of  meal-times.  In  India  it  was  applied 
to  the  meal,  and  then  reintroduced  into  England  and  believed 
to  be  a  native  Indian  word. 


Xn.— §  5.  Grammar,  etc. 

Among  points  not  found  in  BeacJi-la-mar  I  shall  mention 
the  extensive  use  of  piecee,  which  in  accordance  with  Chinese 
grammar  is  required  between  a  numeral  and  the  noun  indicating 
what  is  counted ;  thus  in  a  Chinaman's  description  of  a  three- 
masted  screw  steamer  with  two  funnels  :  "  Thlee  piecee  bam- 
boo, two  piecee  puff-pufF,  walk-along  inside,  no  can  see  "  (walk- 
along  —  the  engine).  Side  means  any  locality :  he  belongey 
China-side  now  (he  is  in  China),  topside  above,  or  high,  bottom- 
side  below,  farside  bej^ond,  this-side  here,  allo-side  around.  In 
a  similar  way  time  (pronounced  tim  or  teem)  is  used  in  that-tim 
then,  when,  what-iim  when  ?  one-tim  once,  only,  ttvo-tim  twice, 
again,  nother-tim  again. 

In  one  respect  the  Chinese  sound  system  is  accountable  for 
a  deviation  from  Beach-la-mar,  namely  in  the  substitution 
of  I  for  r:  loom,  all  light  for  'room,  all  right,'  etc.,  ivhile  the 
islanders  often  made  the  inverse  change.  But  the  tendency  to 
add  a  vowel  after  a  final  consonant  is  the  same  :  makee,  too 
muchee,  etc.  The  enigmatic  termination  lo,  which  Landtman  found 
in  some  words  in  New  Guinea,  is  also  added  to  some  words  ending 
in  vowel  sounds  in  Pidgin,  according  to  Leland,  who  instances 
die-lo,  die  ;  in  his  texts  I  find  the  additional  examples  biiy-lo,  say-lo, 
2)ay-lo,  hear-lo,  besides  wailo,  or  wijlo,  which  is  probably  from  aicay ; 
it  means  'go  away,  away  with  you!  go,  depart,  gone.'  Can  it 
be  the  Chinese  sign  of  the  i^ast  tense  la,  lao,  generalized  ? 

Among  usual  expressions  must  be  mentioned  number  one 
{numpa  one)  '  first-class,  excellent,'    catchee  '  get,    possess,    hold, 


224  PIDGIN  AND  CONGENERS  [ch.  xii 

bring,'   etc.,  ijloper  {plopa)   '  proper,   good,   nice,   correct '  :    you 
belong  lAoper  ?  '  are  you  well  ?  ' 

Another  word  which  was  not  in  use  among  the  South  Sea 
islanders,  namely  have,  in  the  form  hab  or  hap  is  often  used  in 
Pidgin,  even  to  form  the  perfect.  Belong  (belongy)  is  nearly 
as  frequent  as  in  Beach-la-mar,  but  is  used  in  a  different  way  : 
'  My  belongy  Consoo  boy,'  '  I  am  the  Consul's  servant.'  '  You 
belong  clever  inside,'  'you  are  intelligent.'  The  usual  way  of 
asking  the  price  of  something  is  '  how  much  belong  ?  ' 


XII.— §  6.  General  Theory. 

Lingos  of  the  same  type  as  Beach-la-mar  and  Pidgin-English 
are  found  in  other  parts  of  the  world  where  whites  and  natives 
meet  and  have  to  find  some  medium  of  communication.  Thus 
a  Danish  doctor  living  in  Belgian  Congo  sends  me  a  few  speci- 
mens of  the  '  Pidgin  '  spoken  there  :  to  indicate  that  his  master 
has  received  many  letters  from  home,  the  '  boy '  will  say, 
"  Massa  catch  plenty  mammy-book  "  {mammy  meaning  '  woman, 
Avife  ').  Breeze  stands  for  air  in  general  ;  if  the  boy  wants  to 
say  that  he  has  pumped  up  the  bicj'cle  tjTes,  he  will  say, 
"  Plenty  breeze  live  for  inside,"  live  being  here  the  general  term 
for  'to  be  '  (Beach-1.  stop)  ;  '  is  your  master  in  ?  '  becomes 
'  JMassa  live  ?  '  and  the  ans^^'er  is  '  he  no  live  '  or  '  he  live  for 
hup  '  (i.e.  he  is  upstairs).  If  a  man  has  a  stomach-ache  he  will 
say  '  he  hurt  me  for  belly  plenty  too  much  ' — too  much  is  thus 
used  exactly  as  in  Beach-la-mar  and  Chinese  Pidgin.  The 
similarity  of  all  these  jargons,  in  spite  of  unavoidable  smaller 
differences,  is  in  fact  very  striking  indeed. 

It  may  be  time  now  to  draw  the  moral  of  all  this.  And  first 
I  want  to  point  out  that  these  languages  are  not  '  mixed 
languages  '  in  the  proper  sense  of  that  term.  Churchill  is  not 
right  when  he  says  that  Beach-la-mar  "  gathered  material  from 
every  source,  it  fused  them  all."  As  a  matter  of  fact,  it  is 
English,  and  nothing  but  English,  with  very  few  admixtures, 
and  all  of  these  are  such  words  as  had  previously  been 
adopted  into  the  English  speech  of  those  classes  of  the  popu- 
lation, sailors,  etc.,  with  whom  the  natives  came  into  contact : 
the}'  were  therefore  justified  in  their  belief  that  these  words 
formed  part  of  the  English  tongue  and  that  what  they  learned 
themselves  was  real  English.  The  natives  really  adhere  to 
Windisch's  rule  about  the  adoption  of  loan-words  (above,  XI  §  10). 
If  there  are  more  Chinese  words  in  Pidgin  than  there  are  Poly- 
nesian ones  in  Beach-la-mar,  this  is  a  natural  consequence 
of    the  fact    that  the    Chinese    ci^•ilization   ranked  incomparably 


§6]  GENERAL   THEORY  225 

much  higher  than  the  Polynesian,  and  that  therefore  the 
Enghsh  living  in  China  would  adopt  tliesc  words  into  their  own 
speech.  Still,  their  number  is  not  very  large.  And  we  have 
seen  that  there  are  some  words  which  the  Easterners  must 
naturally  suppose  to  be  English,  while  the  English  think  that 
they  belong  to  the  vernacular,  and  in  using  them  each  party 
is  thus  under  the  delusion  that  he  is  rendering  a  service  to  the 
other. 

This  leads  me  to  my  second  point :  those  deviations  from 
correct  English,  those  corruptions  of  pronunciation  and  those 
simplifications  of  grammar,  which  have  formed  the  object  of 
this  short  sketch,  are  due  just  as  much  to  the  English  as  to  the 
Easterners,  and  in  many  points  they  began  with  the  former 
rather  than  with  the  latter  (of,  Schuchardt,  Auf  anlass  des 
Volapilks,  1888,  8;  KS  4.  35,  SID  3G ;  ESt  15.  292),  From 
Schuchardt  I  take  the  follo\\ing  quotation  :  "  The  usual  question 
on  reaching  the  portico  of  an  Indian  bmigalow  is.  Can  missus  see  ? 
— it  being  a  popular  superstition  amongst  the  Europeans  that 
to  enable  a  native  to  understand  English  he  must  be  addressed 
as  if  he  were  deaf,  and  in  the  most  infantile  language."  This 
tendency  to  meet  the  '  inferior  races  '  half-way  in  order  to  facili- 
tate matters  for  them  is  by  Churchill  called  "  the  one  supreme 
axiom  of  international  philology  :  the  proper  way  to  make  a 
foreigner  understand  what  you  would  say  is  to  use  broken 
English.  He  speaks  it  himself,  therefore  give  him  what  he  uses." 
We  recognize  here  the  same  mistaken  notion  that  we  have  seen 
above  in  the  language  of  the  nursery,  where  mothers  and  others 
will  talk  a  curious  sort  of  mangled  English  which  is  believed  to 
represent  real  babytalk,  though  it  has  many  traits  which  are 
pm-ely  conventional.  In  both  cases  these  more  or  less  artificial 
perversions  are  thought  to  be  an  aid  to  those  who  have  not  yet 
mastered  the  intricacies  of  the  language  in  question,  though  the 
ultimate  result  is  at  best  a  retardation  of  the  perfect  acquisition 
of  correct  speech. 

My  view,  then,  is  that  Beach-la-mar  as  well  as  Pidgin  is 
English,  only  English  learnt  imperfectly,  in  consequence  jmrtly 
of  the  difficulties  always  inherent  in  learning  a  totally  different 
language,  partly  of  the  obstacles  put  in  the  way  of  learning  by 
the  linguistic  behaviour  of  the  English-speaking  people  them- 
selves. The  analogy  of  its  imperfections  with  those  of  a  baby's 
speech  in  the  first  period  is  striking,  and  includes  errors  of  pro- 
nunciation, extreme  simplification  of  grammar,  scantiness  of 
vocabulary,  even  to  such  peculiarities  as  that  the  word  too  is 
apprehended  in  the  sense  of  '  very  much,'  and  such  phrases  as 
you  better  go,  etc. 

15 


226  PIDGIN  AND   CONGENERS  [ch.  xii 

Xn.— §7.  Mauritius  Creole. 

The  view  here  advanced  on  the  character  of  these  '  Pidgin  ' 
languages  is  corroborated  when  we  see  that  other  languages  under 
similar  circumstances  have  been  treated  in  exactly  the  same  w^ay 
as  English.  With  regard  to  French  in  the  island  of  Mauritius, 
formerly  He  de  France,  we  are  fortunate  in  possessing  an  ex- 
cellent treatment  of  the  subject  by  M.  C.  Baissac  {ttude  sur  le 
Patois  Creole  Mauricien,  Nancy,  1880  ;  cf.  the  same  writer's  Le 
Folk-lore  de  Vile-Maurice,  Paris,  1888,  I^t^s  litteratures  populaires, 
tome  xxvii).  The  island  was  uninhabited  when  the  French 
occupied  it  in  1715  ;  a  great  many  slaves  were  imported  from 
Madagascar,  and  as  a  means  of  intercourse  between  them  and 
their  French  masters  a  French  Creole  language  sprang  up,  which 
has  survived  the  English  conquest  (1810)  and  the  subsequent 
wholesale  introduction  of  coolies  from  India  and  elsewhere.  The 
paramount  element  in  the  vocabulary  is  French  ;  one  may  read 
many  pages  in  Baissac's  texts  without  coming  across  any  foreign 
words,  apart  from  the  names  of  some  indigenous  animals  and 
plants.  In  the  i)honetic  structure  there  are  a  few  all-pervading 
traits  :  the  front-round  vowels  are  replaced  by  the  corresponding 
unrounded  vowels  or  in  a  few  cases  by  [u],  and  instead  of  [/,  5] 
we  find  [s,  z] ;  thus  ir^  heureux,  ine  plime  une  plume,  saldne 
chacun(e),  zize  juge,  zunu  genou,  suval  cheval  :  I  replace  Baissac's 
notation,  which  is  modelled  on  the  French  spelling,  by  a  more 
phonetic  one  according  to  his  own  indications  ;  but  I  keep  his 
final  e  miiet. 

The  grammar  of  this  language  is  as  simple  as  possible.  Sub- 
stantives have  the  same  form  for  the  two  numbers  :  di,  sural 
deux  chevaux.  There  is  no  definite  article.  The  adjective  is 
invariable,  thus  also  sa  for  ce,  cet,  cette,  ces,  ceci,  cela,  celui, 
celle,  ceux,  celles.  Mo  before  a  verb  is  '  I.'  before  a  substantive 
it  is  possessive  :  mo  koni  I  laiow,  mo  lakaze  my  house  ;  in  the 
same  way  to  is  you  and  your,  but  in  the  tliird  person  a  dis- 
tinction is  made,  for  li  is  he  or  she,  but  his  or  her  is  so,  and 
here  we  have  even  a  plural,  zaute  from  '  les  autres,'  which  form 
is  also  used  as  a  jjlural  of  the  second  person  :  mo  va  alle  av  zaut, 
1  shall  go  with  yoii. 

The  genitive  is  expressed  by  word-order  without  any  pre- 
position :  lakase  so  papa  his  father's  house  ;  also  with  so  before  the 
nominative  :    so  piti  ppa  Azor  old  Azor's  child. 

The  form  in  which  the  French  words  have  been  taken  over 
presents  some  curious  features,  and  in  some  cases  illustrates  the 
difficulty  the  blacks  felt  in  separating  the  words  which  they 
heard   in    the    French    utterance    as    one    continuous   stream    of 


§7]  MAURITIUS    CREOLE  227 

sounds.  There  is  evidently  a  disinclination  to  begin  a  word  with 
a  vowel,  and  sometimes  an  initial  vowel  is  left  out,  as  bitation 
habitation,  tranz4  etranger,  but  in  other  cases  z  is  taken  from 
the  French  plural  article  :  zozo  oiseau,  zistoire,  zenfan,  zimaze 
image,  zalfan  elephant,  zanimo  animal,  or  n  from  the  French 
indefinite  article  :  name  ghost,  nabi  (or  zabi)  habit.  In  many 
cases  the  whole  Fi'ench  article  is  taken  as  an  integral  part  of  the 
word,  as  Urat  rat,  Uroi,  licien  chien,  latahe  table,  Ure  heure  (often 
as  a  conjunction  '  when  ') ;  thus  also  with  the  plural  article 
lizii  from  les  yeux,  but  without  the  plural  signification  :  ine 
lizii  an  eye.  Similarly  ene  lazoie  a  goose.  Words  that  are  often 
used  in  French  with  the  so-called  partitive  article  keep  this  ;  thus 
disel  salt,  divin  wine,  duri  rice,  ene  dipin  a  loaf  ;  here  also  we 
meet  with  one  word  from  the  French  plural  :  ine  dizij  an  egg, 
from  des  ceufs.  The  French  mass- word  with  the  partitive  article 
du  momle  has  become  dimunde  or  dumune,  and  as  it  means 
'  people  '  and  no  distinction  is  made  between  plural  and  singular, 
it  is  used  also  for  '  person  '  :    ijie  vi4  dimunde  an  old  man. 

Verbs  have  only  one  form,  generally  from  the  French  infi- 
nitive or  past  participle,  which  in  most  cases  would  fall  together 
{manze  =  manger,  mange  ;  kuri  =  courir,  couru)  ;  this  serves 
for  all  persons  in  both  numbers  and  all  moods.  But  tenses  are 
indicated  by  means  of  auxiliary  words  :  va  for  the  future,  ii 
(from  ite)  for  the  ordinary  past,  and  fine  for  the  perfect :  mo 
manzi  I  eat,  mo  va  manzi,  I  shall  eat,  mo  ti  manze  I  ate,  mo 
fine  manzi  I  have  eaten,  mo  fine  fini  I  have  finished.  Further, 
there  is  a  curious  use  of  apre  to  express  what  in  English  are  called 
the  progressive  or  expanded  tenses  :  mo  apre  manzi  I  am  eating, 
mo  ti  apre  manzi  I  was  eating,  and  of  pour  to  express  the  imme- 
diate future  :  mo  pour  manzi  I  am  going  to  eat,  and  finally  an 
immediate  past  may  be  expressed  by  Jik :  mo  fik  manzi  I  have 
just  been  eating  (je  ne  fais  que  de  manger).  As  these  may  be 
combined  in  various  ways  {mo  va  fine  manze  I  shall  have  eaten, 
even  mo  ti  va  fik  manzi  I  should  have  eaten  a  moment  ago,  etc.), 
the  language  has  really  succeeded  in  building  up  a  very  fine  and 
rich  verbal  system  with  the  simplest  possible  means  and  with 
perfect  regularity. 

The  French  separate  negatives  have  been  combined  into  one  word 
each :  napa  not  (there  is  not),  narien  nothing,  and  similarly  nek  only. 

In  many  cases  the  same  form  is  used  for  a  substantive  or 
adjective  and  for  a  verb  :  mo  soif,  mo  faim  I  am  thirsty  and 
hungry  ;    U  content  so  madame  he  is  fond  of  his  wife. 

C6te  (or  d  cote)  is  a  preposition  '  by  the  side  of,  near,'  but 
also  means  '  where ' :  la  case  dcote  U  resti  '  the  house  in  which  he 
lives  ' ;  of.  Pidgin  side. 


328  PIDGIN   AND   CONGENERS  [ch.  xii 

In  all  this,  as  will  easily  be  seen,  there  is  very  little  French 
grammar  ;  this  will  he  especially  evident  when  we  compare  the 
French  verbal  system  ^nth  its  many  intricacies :  difference 
according  to  person,  number,  tense  and  mood  with  their  endings, 
changes  of  root-vowels  and  stress-place,  etc.,  with  the  im- 
changed  verbal  root  and  the  invariable  auxiliary  syllables  of 
the  Creole.  But  there  is  really  as  little  in  the  Creole  dialect  of 
Malagasy  grammar,  as  I  have  ascertained  b}'  looking  through 
G.  W.  Parker's  Grammar  (London,  1883)  :  both  nations  in  form- 
ing this  means  of  communication  have,  as  it  were,  stripped  them- 
selves of  all  their  previous  grammatical  habits  and  have  spoken 
as  if  their  minds  were  just  as  innocent  of  grammar  as  those  of 
very  small  babies,  whether  French  or  Malagasy.  Thus,  and 
thus  only,  can  it  be  explained  that  the  grammar  of  this  variety 
of  French  is  for  all  practical  purposes  identical  with  the  grammar 
of  those  two  varieties  of  English  which  we  have  previously  ex- 
amined in  this  chapter 

No  one  can  read  Baissac's  collection  of  folk-tales  from 
Mauritius  without  being  often  struck  with  the  felicity  and  even 
force  of  this  language,  in  spite  of  its  inevitable  naivetd  and  of  the 
childlike  simplicity  of  its  constructions.  If  it  were  left  to  itself 
it  might  develop  into  a  really  fine  idiom  without  abandoning 
any  of  its  characteristic  traits.  But  as  it  is,  it  seems  to  be  con- 
stantly changing  through  the  influence  of  real  French,  which  is 
more  and  more  taught  to  and  imitated  by  the  islanders,  and  the 
day  may  come  when  most  of  the  features  described  in  this  rapid 
sketch  will  have  given  place  to  something  which  is  less  original, 
but  will  be  more  readily  understood  by  Parisian  globe-trotters 
who  may  happen  to  visit  the  distant  island. 

Xn.— §  8.  Chinook  Jargon. 

The  view  here  advanced  may  be  further  put  to  the  test  if 
we  examine  a  totally  different  language  developed  in  another 
part  of  the  world,  viz.  in  Oregon.  I  give  its  history  in  an 
abridged  form  from  Hale.^  When  the  first  British  and  American 
trading  ships  appeared  on  the  north-w-est  coast  of  America,  towards 
the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century,  they  found  a  great  number  of 
distinct  languages,  the  Nootka,  Nisqually,  Chinook,  Chihailish  and 

1  See  An  International  Idiom.  A  Manual  of  the  Oregon  Trade  Language, 
or  Chinook  Jargon,  by  Horatio  Hale  (London,  1890).  Besides  this  I  have 
used  a  Vocabulary  of  the  Jargon  or  Trade  Language  of  Oregon  [by  Lionnet] 
published  by  the  Smithsonian  Institution  (1853),  and  George  Gibbs,  A 
Dictionary  of  the  Chinook  Jargon  (Smithsonian  Inst.,  1863).  Lionnet  spells 
the  words  according  to  the  French  fashion,  while  Gibbs  and  Hale  spell  them 
in  the  English  way.  I  have  given  them  with  the  continental  values  of  the 
vowels  in  accordance  with  the  indications  in  Hale'a  glossary. 


§8]  CHINOOK   JARGON  229 

others,  all  of  them  harsh  in  pronunciation,  complex  in  structure, 
and  each  spoken  over  a  very  limited  space.  The  traders  learnt 
a  few  Nootka  words  and  the  Indians  a  few  English  words. 
Afterwards  the  traders  began  to  frequent  the  Columbia  River, 
and  naturally  attempted  to  communicate  with  the  natives  there 
by  means  of  the  words  which  they  had  found  intelligible  at 
Nootka.  The  Chinooks  soon  acquired  these  words,  both  Nootka 
and  English.  When  later  the  white  traders  made  permanent 
establishments  in  Oregon,  a  real  language  was  required  ;  and 
it  was  formed  by  drawing  upon  the  Chinook  for  such  words  as 
were  requisite,  numerals,  pronouns,  and  some  adverbs  and  other 
words.  Thus  enriched,  '  the  Jargon,'  as  it  now  began  to  be 
styled,  became  of  great  service  as  a  means  of  general  intercourse. 
Now,  French  Canadians  in  the  service  of  the  fur  companies  were 
brought  more  closely  into  contact  with  the  Indians,  hunted  with 
them,  and  lived  with  them  on  terms  of  familiarity.  The  con- 
sequence was  that  several  French  words  were  added  to  the  slender 
stock  of  the  Jargon,  including  the  names  of  various  articles  of 
food  and  clothing,  implements,  several  names  of  the  parts  of  the 
body,  and  the  verbs  to  run,  sing  and  dance,  also  one  conjunction, 
'puis,  reduced  to  pi. 

"  The  origin  of  some  of  the  words  is  rather  whimsical.  The 
Americans,  British  and  French  are  distinguished  by  the  terms 
Boston,  Kinchotsh  (King  George),  and  pasaiuks,  which  is  presumed 
to  be  the  word  Frangais  (as  neither  /,  r  nor  the  nasal  n  can  be 
pronounced  by  the  Indians)  with  the  Cliinook  plural  termination 
uJcs  added.  .  .  .  '  Foolish  '  is  expressed  by  pelton  or  pilton,  derived 
from  the  name  of  a  deranged  person,  one  Archibald  Pelton,  whom 
the  Indians  saw  at  Astoria  ;  his  strange  appearance  and  actions 
made  such  an  impression  upon  them,  that  thenceforward  anyone 
behaving  in  an  absurd  or  irrational  manner  "  was  termed  pelton. 

The  phonetic  structure  is  very  simple,  and  contains  no  sound 
or  combination  that  is  not  easy  to  Englishmen  and  Frenchmen 
as  well  as  to  Indians  of  at  least  a  dozen  tribes.  The  numerous 
harsh  Indian  velars  either  disappear  entirely  or  are  softened  to  h 
and  k.  On  the  other  hand,  the  d,  /,  r,  v,  z  of  the  English  and 
French  become  in  the  mouth  of  a  Chinook  t,  j),  I,  w,  s.    Examples  : 

Chinook 


thliakso 

yakso 

hair 

etsghot 

itsJiut 

black  bear 

tkalaitanam 

kalaitan 

arrow,  shot,  bullet 

ntshaika 

nesaika 

we 

mshaika 

mesaika 

we 

thlaitshka 

klaska  {tlaska) 

they 

tkhlon 

klon  (tlun) 

three 

280 

PID 

GIN  AND  CONGENE] 

RS               [CH. 

English  : 

handkercki 
cry 
fire 
dry 

lef  hakatshum  (kenke^him) 
klai,  kalai  (kai) 
paia 
tlai,  delai 

handkerchief 
cry,  mourn 
fire,  cook,  ripe 
dry 

French  : 

courir 
la  bouche 
le  mouton 

kuli 

labus  (labush) 
lemuto 

run 

mouth 
sheep 

The  forms  in  parentheses  are  those  of  the  French  glossary 
(1853). 

It  will  be  noticed  that  many  of  the  French  words  have  the 
definite  article  affixed  (a  trait  noticed  in  many  words  in  the 
French  Creole  dialect  of  Mauritius).  More  than  half  of  the  words 
in  Hale's  glossary  beginning  with  I  have  this  origin,  thus  labutai 
bottle,  lakloa  cross,  lamie  an  old  woman  (la  vieille),  lapnshet  fork 
(la  fourchette),  latld  noise  (faire  du  train),  lulu  finger,  lejaub  (or 
diaub,  yaub)  devil  (le  diable),  lema  hand,  liplet  missionary  (le 
pretre),  litd  tooth.  The  plural  article  is  found  in  lisdp  egg  (les 
oeufs) — the  same  word  in  which  Mauritius  French  has  also 
adopted  the  pliu'al  form. 

Some  of  the  meanings  of  English  words  are  rather  curious  ; 
thus,  kol  besides  '  cold  '  means  '  winter,'  and  as  the  j'ears,  as  with 
the  old  Scandinavians,  are  reckoned  by  winters,  also  '  year.' 
Sun  {son)  besides  '  sun '  also  means  '  day.'  Spos  (often  pro- 
nounced pas),  as  in  Beach-la-mar,  is  a  common  conjunction,  *  if, 
when.' 

The  grammar  is  extremely  simple.  Nouns  are  invariable  ; 
the  plural  generally  is  not  distinguished  from  the  singular ; 
sometimes  haiu  (ayo)  '  much,  many  '  is  added  by  way  of  em- 
phasis. The  genitive  is  shown  by  position  only :  kahta  nem 
maika  papa?  (lit.,  what  name  thou  father)  what  is  the  name  of 
your  father  ?  The  adjective  precedes  the  noun,  and  com- 
parison is  indicated  by  periphrasis.  '  I  am  stronger  than  thou  ' 
would  be  weke  maika  skukiim  kahkwa  naika.  lit.  '  not  thou 
strong  as  I.'  The  superlative  is  indicated  by  the  adverb  haids 
'  great,  very  '  :  haids  oilman  okuk  kanim,  that  canoe  is  the 
oldest,  lit.,  very  old  that  canoe,  or  (according  to  Gibbs)  by  elip 
'  first,  before  '  :    elip  klosh  '  best.' 

The  numerals  and  pronouns  are  from  the  Chinook,  but  the 
latter,  at  any  rate,  are  very  much  simplified.  Thus  the  pronoun 
for  '  we  '  is  nesaika,  from  Chinook  ntshaika,  which  is  the  ex- 
clusive form,  meaning  '  we  here,'  not  including  the  person  or 
persons  addressed. 

Like  the  nouns,  the  verbs  have  only  one  form,  the  tense  being 
left  to   be  inferred  from  the  context,   or,   if  strictly  necessary, 


§8]  CHINOOK   JARGON  281 

being  indicated  by  an  adverb.  The  future,  in  the  sense  of 
'  about  to,  ready  to,'  may  be  expressed  by  tike,  which  means 
properly  '  wish,'  as  naika  papa  tike  mimalus  {mimelust)  my 
father  is  about  to  die.  The  verb  'to  be '  is  not  expressed : 
maika  pelton,  thou  art  foohsh. 

There  is  a  much-used  verb  mdmuk,  which  means  '  make,  do, 
work '  and  forms  causatives,  as  mamuk  chako  '  make  to  come, 
bring,'  mamxik  mimalus  '  lull.'  With  a  noun  :  mamuk  lalam 
(Ft.  la  rame)  '  make  oar,'  i.e.  '  to  row,'  mamuk  pepe  (make  paper) 
'  write,'  mamuk  po  (make  blow)  '  fire  a  gun.' 

There  is  only  one  true  preposition,  kojm,  which  is  used  in 
various  senses — to,  for,  at,  in,  among,  about,  etc.  ;  but  even 
this  may  generally  be  omitted  and  the  sentence  remain  intelli- 
gible. The  two  conjunctions  spos  and  pi  have  already  been 
mentioned. 


Xn. — §  9.  Chinook  continued. 

In  this  way  something  is  formed  that  may  be  used  as  a 
language  in  spite  of  the  scantiness  of  its  vocabulary.  But  a 
good  deal  has  to  be  expressed  by  the  tone  of  the  voice,  the  look 
and  the  gesture  of  the  speaker.  "  The  Indians  in  general," 
says  Hale  (p.  18),  "  are  very  sparing  of  their  gesticulations.  No 
languages,  probably,  require  less  assistance  from  this  source  than 
theirs.  .  .  .  We  frequently  had  occasion  to  observe  the  sudden 
change  produced  when  a  party  of  the  natives,  who  had  been 
conversing  in  their  own  tongue,  were  joined  by  a  foreigner,  with 
whom  it  was  necessary  to  speak  in  the  Jargon.  The  coun- 
tenances, which  had  before  been  grave,  stolid  and  inexpressive, 
were  instantly  hghted  up  with  animation  ;  the  low,  monotonous 
tone  became  lively  and  modulated  ;  every  feature  was  active  ; 
the  head,  the  arms  and  the  whole  body  were  in  motion,  and 
every  look  and  gesture  became  instinct  with  meaning." 

In  British  Columbia  and  in  parts  of  Alaska  this  larguage  is 
the  prevailing  medium  of  intercourse  between  the  whites  and 
the  natives,  and  there  Hale  thinks  that  it  is  likely  to  live  "  for 
hundreds,  and  perhaps  thousands,  of  years  to  come."  The 
language  has  already  the  beginning  of  a  literature  :  songs, 
mostly  composed  by  women,  who  sing  them  to  plaintive  native 
tunes.  Hale  gives  some  lyrics  and  a  sermon  preached  by  Mr. 
Eells,  who  has  been  accustomed  for  many  years  to  preach  to 
the  Indians  in  the  Jargon  and  who  says  that  he  sometimes  even 
thinks  in  this  idiom. 

Hale  counted  the  words  in  this  sermon,  and  found  that  to 
express  the   whole   of  its   "  historic  and  descriptive  details,  its 


232  PIDGIN  AND   CONGENERS  [ch.  xii 

arguments  and  its  appeals,"  only  97  different  words  were  re- 
quired, and  not  a  single  grammatical  inflexion.  Of  these  words, 
65  were  from  Amerindian  languages  (46  Chinook,  17  Nootka, 
2  Salish),  23  English  and  7  French. 

It  is  very  instructive  to  go  through  the  t^xts  given  by  Hale 
and  to  compare  them  with  the  real  Chinook  text  analysed  in 
Boas's  Hamlbook  of  American  Indian  Languages  (Washington, 
1911,  p.  666  ff.)  :  the  contrast  could  not  be  stronger  between 
simplicity  carried  to  the  extreme  point,  on  the  one  hand,  and 
an  infinite  complexity  and  intricacy  on  the  other.  But  though 
it  must  be  admitted  that  astonishingly  much  can  be  expressed 
in  the  Jargon  by  its  very  simple  and  few  means,  a  European 
mind,  while  bewildered  in  the  entangled  jumble  of  the  Chinook 
language,  cannot  help  missing  a  great  many  nuances  in  the 
Jargon,  where  thoughts  are  reduced  to  their  simplest  formula 
and  where  everj^thing  is  left  out  that  is  not  strictly  necessary 
to  the  least  exacting  minds. 


XII.— §  10.  Makeshift  Languages. 

To  sura  up,  this  Oregon  trade  language  is  to  be  classed 
together  with  Beach-la-mar  and  Pidgin-English,  not  perhaps 
as  '  bastard  '  or  '  mongrel '  languages — such  expressions  taken 
from  biology  always  convey  the  \vrong  impression  that  a 
langur.ge  is  an  '  organism  '  and  had  therefore  better  be  avoided — 
but  rather  as  makeshift  languages  or  minimum  languages, 
means  of  expression  which  do  not  serve  all  the  purposes  of 
ordinary  languages,  but  may  be  used  as  substitutes  where  fuller 
and  better  ones  are  not  available. 

The  analogy  between  this  Jargon  and  the  makeshift  languages 
of  the  East  is  closer  than  might  perhaps  aj^pear  at  first  blush, 
only  we  must  make  it  clear  to  ourselves  that  Enghsh  is  in  the 
two  cases  placed  in  exactly  the  inverse  position.  Pidgin  and 
Beach-la-mar  are  essentially  English  learnt  imperfectly  by  the 
Easterners,  the  Oregon  Jargon  is  essentially  Chinook  learnt  im- 
perfectly by  the  English.  Just  as  in  the  East  the  English  not  only 
suffered  but  also  abetted  the  yellows  in  their  corruption  of  the 
English  language,  so  also  the  Amerindians  met  the  English 
half-way  through  simplifying  their  own  speech.  If  in  Polynesia 
and  China  the  makeshift  language  came  to  contain  some  Poh'- 
nesian  and  Chinese  words,  they  were  those  which  the  English 
themselves  had  borrowed  into  their  own  language  and  which 
the  yellows  therefore  must  think  formed  a  legitimate  part  of 
the  language  they  wanted  to  speak  ;  and  in  the  same  w^ay  the 
American    Jargon    contains    such    words    from    the    Eiu-opean 


§10]  MAKESHIFT   LANGUAGES  288 

languages  as  had  been  previously  adopted  by  the  reds.  If  the 
Jargon  embraces  so  many  French  t^rms  for  the  various  parts 
of  the  body,  one  concomitant  reason  probably  is  that  these 
names  in  the  original  Chinook  language  presented  special  diffi- 
culties through  being  specialized  and  determined  by  possessive 
affixes  (my  foot,  for  instance,  is  lekxeps,  thy  foot  tdmeps,  its 
foot  Jelaps,  our  (dual  inclusive)  feet  tetxaps,  your  (dual)  feet 
temtaps  ;  I  simpliiy  the  notation  in  Boas's  Handbook,  p.  58G), 
so  that  it  was  incomparablj'^  easier  to  take  the  French  lepi  and 
use  it  unchanged  in  all  cases,  no  matter  what  the  number,  and 
no  matter  who  the  possessor  was.  The  natives,  who  had  learnt 
such  words  from  the  French,  evidently  used  them  to  other 
whites  under  the  impression  that  thereby  they  could  make  them- 
selves more  readily  understood,  and  the  British  and  American 
traders  probably  imagined  them  to  be  real  Chinook ;  anyhow, 
their  use  meant  a  substantial  economy  of  mental  exertion. 

The  cliief  point  I  want  to  make,  however,  is  with  regard  to 
grammar.  In  all  these  languages,  both  in  the  makeshift 
English  and  French  of  the  East  and  in  the  makeshift  Amerindian 
of  the  North- West,  the  grammatical  structure  has  been  simpli- 
fied very  miich  beyond  what  we  fold  in  any  of  the  languages 
involved  in  their  making,  and  simplified  to  such  an  extent  that 
it  may  be  expressed  in  very  few  words,  and  those  nearly  the 
same  in  all  these  languages,  the  chief  rule  being  common  to  them 
all,  that  substantives,  adjectives  and  verbs  remain  alwaj^s  un- 
changed. The  vocabularies  are  as  the  poles  asunder — in  the  East 
English  and  French,  in  America  Chinook,  etc. — but  the  morphology 
of  all  these  languages  is  practically  identical,  because  in  all  of 
them  it  has  reached  the  vanishing-point.  This  shows  conclu- 
sively that  the  reason  of  this  simplicity  is  not  the  Chinese  sub- 
stratum or  the  influence  of  Chinese  grammar,  as  is  so  often 
believed.  Pidgin-English  cannot  be  described,  as  is  often  done, 
as  Enghsh  with  Chinese  pronunciation  and  Chinese  grammar, 
because  in  that  case  we  should  expect  Beach-la-mar  to  be  quite 
different  from  it,  as  the  substratum  there  would  be  jMelanesian, 
which  in  many  ways  differs  from  Chinese,  and  further  we  should 
expect  the  Mauritius  Creole  to  be  French  with  Malagasy  pro- 
nunciation and  Malagasy  grammar,  and  on  the  other  hand  the 
Oregon  trade  language  to  be  Chinook  with  English  pronunciation 
and  English  grammar — but  in  none  of  these  cases  would  this 
description  tally  with  the  obvious  facts.  We  might  just  as  well 
say  that  the  speech  of  a  two-year-old  child  in  England  is 
English  with  Chinese  grammar,  and  that  of  the  two-year-old 
French  child  is  French  modelled  on  Chinese  grammar :  the 
truth   on  the  contrary,  is  that  in  all  these  seemingly  so  different 


284  PIDGIN   AND   CONGENERS  [ch.  xii 

cases  the  aame  mental  factor  is  at  work,  namely,  imperfect 
mastery  of  a  language,  which  in  its  initial  stage,  in  the  child 
with  its  first  language  and  in  the  grown-up  with  a  second 
language  learnt  by  imperfect  methods,  leads  to  a  superficial 
knowledge  of  the  most  indispensable  words,  with  total  disregard 
of  grammar.  Often,  here  and  there,  this  is  combined  with  a 
wish  to  express  more  than  is  possible  with  the  means  at  hand, 
and  thus  generates  the  attempts  to  express  the  inexpressible  by 
means  of  those  more  or  less  ingenious  and  more  or  less  comical 
devices,  with  paraphrases  and  figurative  or  circuitous  designa- 
tions, which  we  have  seen  first  in  the  chapters  on  children's 
language  and  now  again  in  Beach-la-mar  and  its  congeners. 

Exactly  the  same  characteristics  are  found  again  in  the 
lingua  geral  Brazilica,  which  in  large  parts  of  Brazil  serves  as 
the  means  of  communication  between  the  whites  and  Indians 
or  negroes  and  also  between  Indians  of  different  tribes.  It 
"  possesses  neither  declension  nor  conjugation "  and  "  places 
words  after  one  another  without  grammatical  flexion,  with  dis- 
regard of  nuances  in  sentence  structure,  but  in  energetic  brevity," 
it  is  "easy  of  pronunciation,"  with  many  vowels  and  no  hard  con- 
sonant groups — in  all  these  respects  it  differs  considerably  from  the 
original  Tupi,  from  which  it  has  been  evolved  by  the  Europeans.^ 

Finally,  I  would  point  the  contrast  between  these  makeshift 
languages  and  slang  :  the  former  are  an  outcome  of  linguistic 
poverty ;  they  are  born  of  the  necessity  and  the  desire  to  make 
oneself  understood  where  the  ordinary  idiom  of  the  individual 
is  of  no  use,  while  slang  expressions  are  due  to  a  linguistic  exu- 
berance :  the  individual  creating  them  knows  perfectly  well  the 
ordinary  words  for  the  idea  he  wants  to  express,  but  in  youthful 
playfulness  he  is  not  content  with  what  is  everybody's  property, 
and  thus  consciously  steps  outside  the  routine  of  everyday 
language  to  produce  something  that  is  calculated  to  excite 
merriment  or  even  admiration  on  the  part  of  his  hearers.  The 
results  in  both  cases  may  sometimes  show  related  features,  for 
some  of  the  figurative  expressions  of  Beach-la-mar  recall  certain 
slang  words  by  their  bold  metaphors,  but  the  motive  force  in 
the  two  kinds  is  totally  different,  and  where  a  comic  effect  is 
produced,  in  one  case  it  is  intentional  and  in  the  other  unintentional. 

Xn. — §  11.  Romanic  Languages. 

When  Schuchardt  began  his  studies  of  the  various  Creole 
languages  formed  in  many  parts  of  the  world  where  EurojDeans 

*  See  Martius,  Beitr.  zur  Ethnogr.  und  Sprachenkunde  Amerikas  (Leipzig, 
1867),  i.  364  fl.  and  ii    23  £f. 


§11]  ROMANIC   LANGUAGES  285 

epealdng  various  Romanic  and  other  languages  had  come  into 
contact  with  negroes,  Poljmesians  and  other  races,  it  was  with 
the  avowed  intention  of  throwing  light  on  the  origin  of  the 
Romanic  languages  from  a  contact  between  Latin  and  the  lan- 
guages previously  spoken  in  the  countries  colonized  by  the 
Romans.  We  may  now  raise  the  question  whether  Beach-la- 
mar — to  take  that  as  a  typical  example  of  the  kind  of  languages 
dealt  Avith  in  this  chapter — is  likely  to  develop  into  a  language 
which  to  the  English  of  Great  Britain  will  stand  in  the  same 
relation  as  French  or  Portuguese  to  Latin.  The  answer  cannot 
be  doubtful  if  we  adhere  tenaciously  to  the  points  of  view  already 
advanced.  Development  into  a  separate  language  would  be 
imaginable  only  on  condition  of  a  complete,  or  a  nearly  com- 
plete, isolation  from  the  language  of  England  (and  America) — 
and  how  should  that  be  effected  nowadays,  with  our  present 
means  of  transport  and  communication  ?  If  such  isolation  were 
indeed  possible,  it  would  also  result  in  the  breaking  off  of  com- 
munication between  the  various  islands  in  which  Beach-la-mar 
is  now  spoken,  and  that  would  probably  entail  the  speedy  ex- 
tinction of  the  language  itself  in  favour  of  the  Polynesian  language 
of  each  separate  island.  On  the  contrary,  what  will  probably 
happen  is  a  development  in  the  opposite  direction,  by  which  the 
English  of  the  islanders  will  go  on  constantly  improving  so  as  to 
approach  correct  usage  more  and  more  in  every  respect :  better 
pronunciation  and  syntax,  more  flexional  forms  and  a  less  scanty 
vocabulary — in  short,  the  same  development  that  has  already 
to  a  large  extent  taken  place  in  the  English  of  the  coloured  popu- 
lation in  the  United  States.  But  this  means  a  gradual  extinction 
of  Beach-la-mar  as  a  separate  idiom  tlirough  its  complete  absorp- 
tion in  ordinary  English  (cf.  above,  p.  228,  on  conditions  at 
Mauritius). 

Do  these  '  makeshift  languages,'  then,  throw  any  light  on 
the  development  of  the  Romanic  languages  ?  They  may  be 
compared  to  the  very  first  initial  stage  of  the  Latin  language  as 
spoken  by  the  barbarians,  many  of  whom  may  be  supposed  to 
have  mutilated  Latin  in  very  much  the  same  way  as  the  Pacific 
islanders  do  English.  But  by  and  by  they  learnt  Latin  much 
better,  and  if  now  the  Romanic  languages  have  simplified  the 
grammatical  structure  of  Latin,  this  simplification  is  not  to  be 
placed  on  the  same  footing  as  the  formlessness  of  Beach-la-mar, 
for  that  is  complete  and  has  been  achieved  at  one  blow  :  the 
islanders  have  never  (i.e.  have  not  yet)  learnt  the  English  form- 
system.  But  the  inhabitants  of  France,  Spain,  etc.,  did  learn 
the  Latin  form  system  as  well  as  the  syntactic  use  of  the  forms. 
This  is  seen  by  the  fact  that  when  French  and  the  other  languages 


236  PIDGIN   AND   CONGENERS  [cH.  xii 

began  to  be  written  down,  there  remained  in  them  a  large  quantity 
of  forms  and  syntactic  applications  that  agree  with  Latin  but 
have  since  then  become  extinct  :  in  its  oldest  written  form, 
therefore,  French  is  very  far  from  the  amorphous  condition  of 
Beach-la-mar :  in  its  nouns  it  had  many  survivals  of  the  Latin 
case  system  (gen.  pi.  corresponding  to  -orum ;  an  oblique  case 
different  from  the  nominative  and  formed  in  various  ways  ac- 
cording to  the  rules  of  Latin  declensions),  in  the  verbs  we  find  an 
intricate  system  of  tenses,  moods  and  persons,  based  on  the 
Latin  flexions.  It  is  true  that  these  had  been  already  to  some 
degree  simplified,  but  this  must  have  happened  in  the  same 
gradual  way  as  the  further  simplification  that  goes  on  before 
our  very  eyes  in  the  written  documents  of  the  following  cen- 
turies :  the  distance  from  the  first  to  the  tenth  century  must  have 
been  bridged  over  in  very  much  the  same  way  as  the  distance 
between  the  tenth  and  the  twentieth  ccnturj'.  No  catacl3'sm 
such  as  that  through  which  English  has  become  Beach-la-mar 
need  on  any  account  be  invoked  to  explain  the  perfectly  natural 
change  from  Latin  to  Old  French  and  from  Old  French  to 
Modern  French. 


CHAPTER  XIII 
THE   WOMAN 

§  1.  Women's  Languages.  §  2.  Tabu.  §  3.  Competing  Languages.  §  4.  Sans- 
krit Drama.  §  5.  Conservatism.  §  6.  Phonetics  and  Grammar 
§  7.  Choice  of  Words.  §  8.  Vocabulary.  §  9.  Adverbs.  §  10.  Periods, 
§  11.  General  Characteristics. 

Xin.— §  1.  Women's  Languages. 

There  are  tribes  in  which  men  and  women  are  said  to  speak  totally 
different  languages,  or  at  any  rate  distinct  dialects.  It  will  be 
worth  our  while  to  look  at  the  classical  example  of  this,  which  is 
mentioned  in  a  great  many  ethnographical  and  linguistic  works, 
viz.  the  Caribs  or  Caribbeans  of  the  Small  Antilles.  The  first  to 
mention  their  distinct  sex  dialects  was  the  Dominican  Breton,  who, 
in  his  Dictionnaire  Carazbe-franQais  (1664),  says  that  the  Caribbean 
chief  had  exterminated  all  the  natives  except  the  women,  who  had 
retained  part  of  their  ancient  language.  This  is  repeated  in  many 
subsequent  accounts,  the  fullest  and,  as  it  seems,  most  reliable 
of  which  is  that  by  Rochefort,  who  spent  a  long  time  among  the 
Caribbeans  in  the  middle  of  the  seventeenth  century :  see  his 
H  istoire  natureUe  et  morale  lies  lies  Antilles  (2c  ed.,  Rotterdam,  1665, 
jD.  449  ff.).  Here  he  says  that  "  the  men  have  a  great  many  expres- 
sions peculiar  to  them,  which  the  Avomen  understand  but  never 
pronounce  themselves.  On  the  other  hand,  the  women  have  words 
and  phrases  which  the  men  never  use,  or  they  would  be  laughed 
to  scorn.  Thus  it  happens  that  in  their  conversations  it  often 
seems  as  if  the  women  had  another  language  than  the  men.  .  .  .  The 
savage  natives  of  Dominica  say  that  the  reason  for  this  is  that  when 
the  Caribs  came  to  occupy  the  islands  these  were  inhabited  by 
an  Arawak  tribe  which  they  exterminated  completely,  with  the 
exception  of  the  women,  whom  they  married  in  order  to  populate 
the  country.  Now,  these  w"  .nen  kept  their  own  language  and  taught 
it  to  their  ^^aughters.  .  .  .  But  tu<.'igh  the  boys  understand 
the  speech  of  their  mothers  and  sisters,  they  nevertheless  follow 
their  fathers  and  brothers  and  conform  to  their  speech  from  the 
age  of  five  or  six.  ...  It  is  asserted  that  the^  is  some  similarity 
between  the  speech  of  the  continental  Arawaks  and  that  of  the 
Carib  women.     But  the  Carib  men  and  women  on  the  continent 

237 


238  THE   WOMAN  [ch.  xin 

apeak  the  same  language,  as  they  have  never  corrupted  their 
natural  speech  by  marriage  with  strange  women." 

This  evidently  is  the  account  wliich  forms  the  basis  of  ever^'- 
tliing  that  has  since  been  written  on  the  subject.  But  it  will  be 
noticed  that  Rochefort  does  not  really  speak  of  the  speech  of  the 
two  sexes  as  totally  distinct  languages  or  dialects,  as  has  often 
been  maintained,  but  only  of  certain  differences  within  the  same 
languaere.  If  we  go  through  the  comparatively  full  and  evidently 
careful  glossary  attached  to  his  book,  in  which  he  d(>notes  the 
words  peculiar  to  the  men  by  the  letter  H  and  those  of  the  women 
by  F,  we  shall  see  that  it  is  only  for  about  one-tenth  of  the  vocabu- 
lary that  such  special  words  have  been  indicated  to  him,  though  the 
matter  evident!}' interested  him  very  much,  so  that  he  would  make 
all  possible  efforts  to  elicit  them  from  the  natives.  In  liis  lists, 
words  special  to  one  or  the  other  sc.x  are  found  most  frequently 
in  the  names  of  the  various  degrees  of  kinship ;  thus,  '  my  father ' 
in  the  speech  of  the  men  in  youmdan,  in  that  of  the  women  nou- 
kduchili,  though  both  in  addressing  him  saj'  bdha  ;  '  my  grand- 
father '  is  iidinoulou  and  ndrgoicti  respectively,  and  thus  also  for 
maternal  uncle,  son  (elder  son,  younger  son),  brother-in-law,  wife, 
mother,  grandmother,  daughter,  cousin — all  of  these  are  different 
according  as  a  man  or  a  woman  is  speaking.  It  is  the  same  with 
the  names  of  some,  though  far  from  all,  of  the  different  parts  of 
the  body,  and  with  some  more  or  less  isolated  words,  as  friend, 
enemy,  joy,  work,  war,  house,  garden,  bed,  poison,  tree,  sun,  moon, 
sea,,  earth.  This  list  comprises  nearly  every  notion  for  which 
Rochefort  indicates  separate  words,  and  it  Avill  be  seen  that  there 
are  innumerable  ideas  for  which  men  and  women  use  the  same 
word.  Further,  we  see  that  where  th(;re  are  differences  these  do 
not  consist  in  small  deviations,  such  as  different  prefixes  or  suffixes 
added  to  the  same  root,  but  in  totally  distinct  roots.  Another 
point  is  very  important  to  my  mind  :  judging  by  the  instances 
in  which  plural  forms  are  given  in  the  lists,  the  words  of  the  two 
sexes  are  inflected  in  exactly  the  same  way  ;  thus  the  grammar  is 
common  to  both,  from  which  we  may  infer  that  we  hav^e  not 
really  to  do  with  two  distinct  languages  in  the  proper  sense  of 
the  word. 

Now,  some  light  may  probably  be  thrown  on  the  problem  of 
this  women's  language  from  a  custom  mentioned  in  some  of  the 
old  books  written  by  travellers  who  have  visited  these  islands. 
Rochefort  himself  (p.  497)  very  briefly  says  that  "  the  women  do 
not  eat  till  their  husbands  have  finished  their  meal,"  and  Lafitau 
(1724)  says  that  women  never  eat  in  the  company  of  their  husbands 
and  never  mention  them  by  name,  but  must  wait  upon  them  as 
their  slaves  ;   with  this  Labat  agrees. 


§  2]  TABU  380 

Xm.— §  2.  Tabu. 

The  fact  that  a  wife  is  not  allowed  to  mention  the  name  of 
her  husband  makes  one  think  that  we  have  here  simply  an  in- 
stance of  a  custom  found  in  various  forms  and  in  var^'ing  degrees 
throughout  tne  world — what  is  called  verbal  tabu  :  under  certain 
circumstances,  at  certain  times,  in  certain  places,  the  use  of  one  or 
more  definite  words  is  interdicted,  because  it  is  superstitiously 
believed  to  entail  certain  evil  consequences,  such  as  exasperate 
demons  and  the  like.  In  place  of  the  forbidden  words  it  is  therefore 
necessary  to  use  some  kind  of  figurative  paraphrase,  to  dig  up  an 
otherwise  obsolete  t^rm,  or  to  disguise  the  real  word  so  as  to  render 
it  more  innocent. 

Now  as  a  matter  of  fact  we  find  that  verbal  tabu  was  a  common 
practice  with  the  old  Caribs  :  when  they  were  on  the  war-path 
they  had  a  great  number  of  mysterious  words  which  women  were 
never  alloAved  to  learn  and  which  even  the  young  men  might  not 
pronounce  before  passing  certain  tests  of  bravery  and  patriotism  ; 
these  war-words  are  described  as  extraordinarily  difficult  ("  un 
baragoin  fort  difficile,"  Rochefort,  p.  450).  It  is  easy  to  see  that 
when  once  a  tribe  has  acquired  the  habit  of  using  a  whole  set  of 
terms  under  certain  frequently  recurring  circumstances,  while 
others  are  at  the  same  time  strictly  interdicted,  this  may  naturally 
lead  to  so  many  words  being  reserved  exclusively  for  one  of  the 
sexes  tliat  an  observer  may  be  tempted  to  speak  of  separate 
'  languages  '  for  the  two  sexes.  There  is  thus  no  occasion  to  believe 
in  the  story  of  a  wholesale  extermination  of  all  male  inhabitants 
by  another  tribe,  though  on  the  other  hand  it  is  easy  to  understand 
how  such  a  m\i;h  may  arise  as  an  explanation  of  the  linguistic 
diflference  between  men  and  women,  when  it  has  become  strong 
enough  to  attract  attention  and  therefore  has  to  be  accounted  for 

In  some  parts  of  the  world  the  connexion  between  a  separate 
women's  language  and  tabu  is  indubitable.  Thus  among  the 
Bantu  people  of  Africa.  With  the  Zulus  a  wife  is  not  allowed  to 
mention  the  name  of  her  father-in-law  and  of  his  brothers,  and  if 
a  similar  word  or  even  a  similar  syllable  occurs  in  the  ordinary 
language,  she  must  substitute  something  else  of  a  similar  meaning. 
In  the  royal  family  the  difficult}'  of  understanding  the  women's 
language  is  further  increased  by  the  Avoman's  being  forbidden 
to  mention  the  names  of  her  husband,  his  father  and  grandfather 
as  well  as  his  brothers.  If  one  of  these  names  means  something 
like  "  the  son  of  the  bull,'*'  each  of  these  words  has  to  be  avoided, 
and  all  kinds  of  paraphrases  have  to  be  used.  According  to  Kranz 
the  interdiction  holds  good  not  only  for  meaning  elements  of  the 
name,  but  even  for  certain  sounds  entering  into  them  ;  thus,  if 


240  THE  WOMAN  [ch.  xiii 

the  name  contains  the  sound  2,  amanzi  '  water  '  has  to  be  altered 
into  amandabi.  If  a  woman  were  to  contravene  tliis  rule  she 
would  be  indicted  for  sorcery  and  put  to  death.  The  substitutes 
thus  introduced  tend  to  be  adopted  by  others  and  to  constitute  a 
real  women's  language. 

With  the  Chiquitos  in  Bolivia  the  difference  between  the  grammars 
of  the  two  sexes  is  rather  curious  (see  V,  Henry,  "  Sur  le  parler 
des  hommes  et  le  parler  des  femmes  dans  la  langue  chiquita,"  Revue 
de  linguistique,  xii.  305,  1879).  Some  of  Henry's  examples  may 
be  thus  summarized  :  men  indicate  by  the  addition  of  -tii  that  a 
male  person  is  spoken  about,  while  the  women  do  not  use  this 
suffix  and  thus  make  no  distinction  between  '  he  '  and  '  she,'  '  hia  ' 
and  '  her.'  Thus  in  the  men's  speech  the  following  distinctions 
would  be  made  : 

He  went  to  his  house  :   yeboiii  ti  n-ipoostii. 
He  went  to  her  house  :   yebotii  ti  n-ipooa. 
She  went  to  his  house  :  yebo  ti  n-ipoostii. 

But  to  express  all  these  different  meanings  the  women  would  have 
only  one  form,  viz. 

yebo  ti  n-ipoos, 

which  in  the  men's  speech  would  mean  only  '  She  went  to  her 
house.' 

To  man}'  substantives  the  men  prefix  a  vowel  which  the  women 
do  not  employ,  thus  o-])etas  'turtle,'  u-tumokos  '  dog,'  i-pis  'wood.' 
For  some  very  important  notions  the  sexes  use  distinct  words ;  thus, 
for  the  names  of  kinship, '  ray  father '  is  iyai  and  isupu,  '  my  mother  * 
ipaJci  and  ijjapa,  '  my  brother  '  tsaruki  and  icibausi  respectively. 

Among  the  languages  of  California,  Yana,  according  to  Dixon 
and  &oeber  [The  American  Anthropologist,  n.s.  5.  15),  is  the 
only  language  that  shows  a  difference  in  the  words  used  hy  men 
and  women — apart  from  tenns  of  relationship,  Mhere  a  distinction 
according  to  the  sex  of  the  speaker  is  made  among  many  Californian 
tribes  as  well  as  in  other  parts  of  the  world,  evidentlj^  "  because 
the  relationship  itself  is  to  them  different,  as  the  sex  is  different." 
But  in  Yana  the  distinction  is  a  linguistic  one,  and  curiouslj^  enough, 
the  few  specimens  given  all  present  a  trait  found  already  in  the 
Chiquito  forms,  namely,  that  the  forms  spoken  by  women  are  shorter 
than  those  of  the  men,  which  appear  as  extensions,  generally  by 
suffixed  -{n)a,  of  the  former. 

Tt  is  surely  needless  to  multiply  instances  of  these  customs,  which 
are  found  among  many  wild  tribes  ;  the  curious  reader  may  be 
referred  to  Lasch,  S.  pp.  7-13,  and  H.  Ploss  and  M.  Bartels,  Das  Weib 
in  der  Natur  und  Volkerkunde  (9th  ed.,  Leipsig,  1908).     The  latter 


§  2]  TABU  241 

says  that  the  Suaheli  system  is  not  carried  through  so  as  to  replace 
the  ordinar}'  language,  but  the  Suaheli  have  for  every  object  which 
they  do  not  care  to  mention  by  its  real  name  a  symbolic  word  under- 
stood by  everybody  concerned.  In  especial  such  symbols  are  used 
by  women  in  their  mysteries  to  denote  obscene  things.  The  words 
chosen  are  cither  ordinar}'  names  for  innocent  things  or  else  taken 
from  the  old  language  or  other  Bantu  languages,  mostly  Kiziguha, 
for  among  the  Waziguha  secret  rites  play  an  enormous  r61e.  Bartels 
finally  says  that  with  us,  too,  women  have  scjiarate  names  for 
everj'thing  connected  with  sexual  life,  and  he  thinks  that  it  is  the 
same  feeling  of  shame  that  underlies  this  custom  and  the  inter- 
diction of  pronouncing  the  names  of  male  relatives.  This,  however, 
does  not  explain  everything,  and,  as  already  indicated,  superstition 
certainly  has  a  large  share  in  this  as  in  other  forms  of  verbal  tabu. 
See  on  this  the  very  full  account  in  the  third  volume  of  Frazer's 
The  Golden  Bough. 

Xni.— §  3.  Competing  Languages. 
A  difference  between  the  language  spoken  by  men  and  that 
spoken  by  women  is  seen  in  many  countries  where  two  languages 
are  struggling  for  supremacy  in  a  peaceful  way — thus  without  any 
question  of  one  nation  exterminating  the  other  or  the  male  part 
of  it.  Among  German  and  Scandinavian  immigrants  in  America 
the  men  mix  much  more  with  the  English-spealdng  population, 
and  therefore  have  better  opportunities,  and  also  more  occasion,  to 
learn  English  than  their  wives,  who  remain  more  within  doors. 
It  is  exactly  the  same  among  the  Basques,  where  the  school,  the 
military  service  and  daily  business  relations  contribute  to  the 
extinction  of  Basque  in  favour  of  French,  and  where  these  factors 
operate  much  more  strongly  on  the  male  than  on  the  female  popula- 
tion :  there  are  families  in  which  the  wife  talks  Basque,  while 
the  husband  does  not  even  understand  Basque  and  does  not  allow 
his  children  to  learn  it  (Bornecque  et  Miihlen,  Les  Provinces  fran- 
Qaises,  5.3).  Vilhelm  Thomsen  informs  me  that  the  old  Livonian 
language,  which  is  now  nearly  extinct,  is  kept  up  with  the 
greatest  fidelity  by  the  women,  while  the  men  are  abandoning  it 
for  Lettish.  Albanian  women,  too,  generally  know  only  Albanian, 
while  the  men  are  more  often  bilingual. 

Xm.— §  4.  Sanskrit  Drama. 
There  are  very  few  traces  of  real  sex  dialects  in  our  Arj'^an  lan- 
guages, though  we  have  the  very  curious  rule  in  the  old  Indian 
drama  that  women  talk  Prakrit  (jjrdJcrta,  the  natural  or  vulgar 
language)  while  men  have  the  privilege  of  talking  Sanskrit  {sam- 

16 


242  THE   WOMAN  [ch.  xiii 

skrta,  the  adorned  language).  The  distinction,  however,  is  not 
one  of  SOX  really,  but  of  rank,  for  Sanskrit  is  the  language  of  gods, 
kings,  princes,  brahmans,  ministers,  chamberlains,  dancing-masters 
and  other  men  in  superior  positions  and  of  a  very  few  women  of 
special  religious  importance,  while  Prakrit  is  spoken  by  men  of  an 
inferior  class,  like  shopkeepers,  law  officers,  aldermen,  bathmen, 
fishermen  and  policemen,  and  by  nearly  all  women.  The  difference 
between  the  two  '  languages  '  is  one  of  degree  only  :  they  are  two 
strata  of  the  same  language,  one  higher,  more  solemn,  stifi  and 
archaic,  and  another  lower,  more  natural  and  familiar,  and  this  easy, 
or  perhaps  we  should  say  slipshod,  style  is  the  only  one  recognized 
for  ordinary  women.  The  difference  may  not  be  greater  than  that 
between  the  language  of  a  judge  and  that  of  a  costermonger  in  a 
modern  novel,  or  between  Juliet's  and  her  nurse's  expressions 
in  Shakespeare,  and  if  all  women,  even  those  we  should  call  the 
'  heroines  '  of  the  plays,  use  only  the  lower  stratum  of  speech,  the 
reason  certainly  is  that  the  social  position  of  women  was  so  inferior 
that  they  ranked  only  with  men  of  the  lower  orders  and  had  no 
share  in  the  higher  culture  which,  with  the  refined  language,  was 
the  privilege  of  a  small  class  of  selected  men. 

Xin.— §5.  Conservatism. 

As  Prakrit  is  a  '  younger  '  and  '  worn-out '  form  of  Sanskrit, 
the  question  here  naturally  arises  :  What  is  the  general  attitude 
of  the  two  sexes  to  those  changes  that  are  constantly  going  on 
in  languages  ?  Can  they  be  ascribed  exclusively  or  predominantly 
to  one  of  the  sexes  ?  Or  do  both  equall}^  participate  in  them  ? 
An  answer  that  is  very  often  given  is  that  as  a  rule  women  are  more 
conservative  than  men,  and  that  they  do  nothing  more  than  keep 
to  the  traditional  language  which  they  have,  learnt  from  their 
parents  and  hand  on  to  their  children,  while  innovations  are  due  , 
to  the  initiative  of  men.  Thus  Cicero  in  an  often-quoted  passage 
says  that  when  he  hears  his  mother-in-law  Loelia,  it  is  to  him  as 
if  he  heard  Plautus  or  Ncevius,  for  it  is  more  natural  for  women  to 
keep  the  old  language  uncorrupted,  as  they  do  not  hear  many 
people's  way  of  speaking  and  thus  retain  what  they  have  fii-st  learnt 
(De  oratore,  III.  45).  This,  however,  does  not  hold  good  in  every 
respect  and  in  every  people.  The  French  engineer,  Victor  Renault, 
who  lived  for  a  long  time  among  the  Botocudos  (in  South  America) 
and  compiled  vocabularies  for  two  of  their  tribes,  speaks  of  the 
ease  with  which  he  could  make  the  savages  who  accompanied  him 
invent  new  words  for  anything.  "  One  of  them  called  out  the 
word  in  a  loud  voice,  as  if  seized  by  a  sudden  idea,  and  the  others 
would  repeat  it  amid  laughter  and  excited  shouts,  and  then  it 


§  5]  CONSERVATISM  248 

was  universally  adopted.  But  the  curious  thing  is  that  it  was 
nearly  always  the  women  who  busied  themselves  in  inventing  new 
words  as  well  as  in  composing  songs,  dirges  and  rhetorical  essays. 
The  word-formations  here  alluded  to  are  probably  names  of  objects 
that  the  Botocudos  had  not  known  previously  ...  as  for  horse, 
krainejoune,  '  head-teeth  ' ;  for  ox,  po-kekri,  '  foot-cloven  ' ;  for 
donkey,  mgo-jonne-orone,  '  beast  with  long  ears.'  But  well-known 
objects  which  have  already  got  a  name  have  often  similar  new 
denominations  invented  for  them,  which  are  then  soon  accepted  by 
the  family  and  community  and  spread  more  and  more  "  {v.  Mar- 
tins, Beitr.  zur  Ethnogr.  u.  Sprachenkunde  Amerikas,  1867,  i.  330). 

I  may  also  quote  what  E.  R.  Edwards  says  in  his  Etude  phonHique 
de  la  langue  japonaise  (Leipzig,  1903,  p.  79)  :  "  In  France  and  in 
England  it  might  be  said  that  women  avoid  neologisms  and  are 
careful  not  to  go  too  far  away  from  the  written  forms  :  in  Southern 
England  the  sound  ^vlitten  wh  [a\.]  is  scarcely  ever  pronounced 
except  in  girls'  schools.  In  Japan,  on  the  contrary,  women  are 
less  conservative  than  men,  whether  in  pronunciation  or  in  the 
selection  of  words  and  expressions.  One  of  the  chief  reasons  is 
that  women  have  not  to  the  same  degree  as  men  undergone  the 
influence  of  the  written  language.  As  an  example  of  the  liberties 
which  the  women  take  may  be  mentioned  that  there  is  in  the 
actual  pronunciation  of  Tokyo  a  strong  tendency  to  get  rid  of 
the  sound  {w),  but  the  women  go  further  in  the  word  atashi,  which 
men  pronounce  watashi  or  watakshi,  '  I.'  Another  tendency  noticed 
in  the  language  of  Japanese  women  is  pretty  widely  spread  among 
French  and  English  women,  namely,  the  excessive  use  of  intensive 
words  and  the  exaggeration  of  stress  and  tone-accent  to  mark 
emphasis.  Japanese  women  also  make  a  much  more  frequent  use 
than  men  of  the  prefixes  of  politeness  o-,  go-  and  mi-." 

Xm. — §  6.  Phonetics  and  Grammar. 

In  connexion  with  some  of  the  phonetic  changes  which  have 
profoundly  modified  the  English  sound  system  we  have  express 
statements  by  old  grammarians  that  women  had  a  more  advanced 
pronunciation  than  men,  and  characteristically  enough  these 
statements  refer  to  the  raising  of  the  vowels  in  the  direction 
of  [i] ;  thus  in  Sir  Thomas  Smith  (1567),  who  uses  expressions  like 
"  mulierculee  qusedam  delicatiores,  et  nonnulli  qui  volunt  isto 
modo  viJeri  loqui  urbanius,"  and  in  another  place  "  fceminse 
qusedam  delicatiores,"  further  in  Mulcaster  (1582)^  and  in  Milton's 

^  "  Ai  is  the  man's  diphthong,  and  sonndeth  full  :  et,  the  woman's, 
and  soundeth  finish  [i.e.  fineish]  in  the  same  both  sense,  and  vse,  a  woman 
is  deintie,  and  Jeinteth  soon,  the  man  fainteth  not  bycause  he  is  nothing  daintie." 
Thus  what  is  now  distinctive  of  refined  as  opposed  to  vulgar  pronunciation 
was  then  characteristic  of  the  fair  sex. 


244  THE   WOMAN  [cir.  xiii 

teacher,  Alexander  Gill  (1G21),  who  speaks  about  "nostra  Mopsse, 
qua}  quidcra  ita  omnia  attenuant." 

In  France,  about  1700,  women  were  inclined  to  pronounce  e 
instead  of  a;  thus  Alemand  (1688)  mentions  BarnaM  as  "  fa9on 
de  prononcer  male  "  and  Bernabe  as  the  pronunciation  of  "  les 
gens  polis  et  delicats  .  .  .  les  dames  surtout  ";  and  Grimarcst  (1712) 
speaks  of  "  ces  marchandes  du  Palais,  qui  au  lieu  de  viadame, 
boulevart,  etc.,  prononccnt  medeme,  boulevert  "  (Thurot  i.  12  and  9). 

There  is  one  change  characteristic  of  many  languages  in  which 
it  seems  as  if  women  have  played  an  important  part  even  if  they 
are  not  solely  responsible  for  it :  I  refer  to  the  weakening  of  the  old 
fully  trilled  tongue-point  r.  I  have  elsewhere  (Fonetik,  p.  417  £f.) 
tried  to  show  that  this  weakening,  which  results  in  various  sounds 
and  sometimes  in  a  complete  omission  of  the  sound  in  some  positions, 
is  in  the  main  a  consequence  of,  or  at  any  rate  favoured  by,  a 
change  in  social  life  :  the  old  loud  trilled  point  sound  is  natural  and 
justified  when  life  is  chiefly  carried  on  out-of-doors,  but  indoor 
life  prefers,  on  the  whole,  less  noisy  speech  habits,  and  the  more 
refined  this  domestic  life  is,  the  more  all  kinds  of  noises  and  even 
speech  sounds  will  be  toned  down.  One  of  the  results  is  that  this 
original  r  sound,  the  rubadub  in  the  orchestra  of  language,  is  no 
longer  allowed  to  bombard  the  ears,  but  is  softened  down  in  various 
ways,  as  we  see  chiefly  in  the  great  cities  and  among  the  educated 
classes,  while  the  rustic  population  in  many  countries  keeps  up 
the  old  sound  with  much  greater  conservatism.  Now  we  find  that 
women  are  not  unfrequently  mentioned  in  connexion  with  this 
reduction  of  the  trilled  r  ;  thus  in  the  sixteenth  century  in  France 
there  was  a  tendency  to  leave  off  the  trilling  and  even  to  go  further 
than  to  the  present  English  untrilled  point  r  by  pronouncing  [z] 
instead,  but  some  of  the  old  grammarians  mention  this  pronuncia- 
tion as  characteristic  of  women  and  a  few  men  who  imitate  women 
(Erasmus  :  mulierculse  Parisinse ;  Sylvius  :  mulierculae  .  .  .  Parrhisinae^ 
et  earum  modo  quidam  parum  viri ;  Pillot :  Parisinse  mulierculae 
.  .  .  adeo  delicatulae  sunt,  ut  pro _2)ere  dicantpese).  In  the  ordinary 
language  there  are  a  few  remnants  of  this  tendency;  thus,  when 
by  the  side  of  the  original  chaire  we  now  have  also  the  form  chaise, 
and  it  is  worthy  of  note  that  the  latter  form  is  reserved  for  the 
everydaj''  signification  (Engl,  chair,  seat)  as  belonging  more  naturally 
to  the  speech  of  women,  while  chaire  has  the  more  special  significa- 
tion of  '  pulpit,  professorial  chair.'  Now  the  same  tendency  to 
substitute  [z] — or  after  a  voiceless  sound  [s] — for  r  is  found  in  our 
owTi  days  among  the  ladies  of  Christiania,  who  will  say  gznelig 
for  gruelig  andfsygtelig  ior  frygtelig  (Brekke,  Bidrag  til  dansknorshens 
lydlcere,  1881,  p.  17  ;  I  have  often  heard  the  sound  myself).  And 
even  in  far-off  Siberia  we  find  that  the  Chuckchi  women  will  say 


§6]  PHONETICS   AND    GRA]\IMAR  243 

nidzaJc  or  nizah  for  the  male  nirak  '  two,'  zerka  for  r'erka  '  walrus,* 
etc.  (Nordqvist  ;  see  fuller  quotations  in  my  Fonetik,  p.  431). 

In  present-day  Englis^h  there  are  said  to  be  a  few  dJfTerences 
in  pronunciation  between  the  two  sexes  ;  thus,  according  to  Daniel 
Jones,  soft  is  pronounced  with  a  long  vowel  [soft]  bj'  men  and  with 
a  short  vowel  [soft]  by  women  ;  similarly  [geel]  is  said  to  be  a 
special  ladies'  pronunciation  of  girl,  which  men  usually  pronounce 
[gal]  ;  cf.  also  on  ivh  above,  p.  243.  So  far  as  I  have  been  able  to 
ascertain,  the  pronunciation  [//uldran]  for  [t/ildron]  children  is 
much  more  frequent  in  women  than  in  men.  It  may  also  be  that 
women  are  more  inclined  to  give  to  the  word  waistcoat  the  full 
long  sound  in  both  syllables,  while  men,  who  have  occasion  to 
use  the  word  more  frequently,  tend  to  give  it  the  historical  form 
[weskot]  (for  the  shortening  compare  breakfast).  But  even  if  such 
observations  were  multiplied — as  probably  they  might  easily  be 
by  an  attentive  observer — they  would  be  only  more  or  less  isolated 
instances,  without  any  deeper  significance,  and  on  the  whole  we 
must  say  that  from  the  phonetic  j)oint  of  view  there  is  scarcely 
any  difference  between  the  speech  of  men  and  that  of  women  :  the 
two  sexes  speak  for  all  intents  and  purposes  the  same  language. 


Xm.— §  7.  Choice  of  Words. 

But  when  from  the  field  of  phonetics  we  come  to  that  of  vocabu- 
lary and  style,  we  shall  find  a  much  greater  number  of  difiPerences, 
though  they  have  received  very  little  attention  in  linguistic  works. 
A  few  have  been  mentioned  by  Greenough  and  Kittredge  :  "  The 
use  of  common  in  the  sense  of  '  vulgar  '  is  distinctly  a  feminine 
peculiarity.  It  would  sound  effeminate  in  the  speech  of  a  man.  So, 
in  a  less  degree,  with  person  for  '  woman,'  in  contrast  to  '  lady.' 
Nice  for  '  fine  '  must  have  originated  in  the  same  way  "  (W,  p.  54). 

Others  have  told  me  that  men  will  generally  say  '  It's  very 
good  of  you,'  where  women  will  say  '  It's  very  kind  of  you.' 
But  such  small  details  can  hardly  be  said  to  be  really  characteristic 
of  the  two  sexes.  There  is  no  doubt,  however,  that  women  in  all 
countries  are  shy  of  mentioning  certain  parts  of  the  human  body 
and  certain  natural  functions  by  the  direct  and  often  rude  denomina- 
tions which  men,  and  especially  young  men,  prefer  when  among 
themselves.  Women  vnW  therefore  invent  innocent  and  euphemistic 
words  and  paraphrases,  which  sometimes  may  in  the  long  run  come 
to  be  looked  upon  as  the  plain  or  blunt  names,  and  therefore  in  their 
turn  have  to  be  avoided  and  replaced  by  more  decent  words. 

In  Pinero's  The  Gay  Lord  Quex  (p.  116)  a  lady  discovers  some 
French  novels  on  the  table  of  another  lady,  and  says  :  "  This  is 
a  little — h'm — isn't  it  ?  " — she  does  not  even  dare  to  say  the  word 


246  THE   WOMAN  [ch.  xiii 

*  indecent,'  and  has  to  express  the  idea  in  inarticulate  language. 
The  word  '  naked  '  is  paraphrased  in  the  following  description 
by  a  woman  of  the  work  of  girls  in  ammunition  works  :  "  They 
have  to  take  off  every  stitch  from  their  bodies  in  one  room,  and 
run  in  their  innocence  and  nothing  else  to  another  room  where 
the  special  clothing  is  "    (Bennett,  The  Pretty  Lady,   176). 

On  the  other  hand,  the  old-fashioned  prudery  which  prevented 
ladies  from  using  such  words  as  legs  and  trousers  ("  those  manly 
garments  which  are  rarely  mentioned  by  name,"  says  Dickens, 
Dombey,  335)  is  now  rightly  looked  upon  as  exaggerated  and  more 
or  less  comical  (cf.  my  GS  §  247). 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  women  exercise  a  great  and  universal 
influence    on    linguistic    development    through    their    instinctive 
shrinking  from  coarse  and  gross  expressions  and  their  preference 
for  refined  and  (in  certain  spheres)  veiled  and  indirect  expressions. 
In  most  cases  that  influence  will  be  exercised  privately  and  in  the 
bosom  of  the  family  ;   but  there  is  one  historical  instance  in  which 
a  group  of  women  worked  in  that  direction  publicly  and  collectively  ; 
I  refer  to  those  French  ladies  who  in  the  seventeenth  century  gathered 
in  the  H6tel  de  Rambouillet  and  are  generally  known  under  the 
name   of   Precieuses.     They   discussed   questions   of   spelling   and 
of  purity  of  pronunciation  and  diction,  and  favoured   all  kinds 
of  elegant  paraphrases  by  which  coarse  and  vulgar  worda  might 
be  avoided.     In  many  ways  this  movement  was  the  counterpart 
of  the  literary  wave  which  about  that  time  was  inundating  Europe 
under   various  names — Gongorism  in   Spain,   Marinism  in  Italy, 
Euphuism  in  England  ;  but  the  Precieuses  went  f  lu-ther  than  their 
male  confreres  in  desiring  to  influence  everyday  language.     When, 
however,  they  used  such  expressions  a«,  for  '  nose,'  '  the  door  of  the 
brain,'  for  '  broom  '  '  the  instrument  of  cleanness,'  and  for  '  shirt ' 
'  the  constant  companion  of    the  dead   and  the  living  '  (la  com- 
pagne  perpetuelle  des  morts  et  des  vivants),  and  many  others,  their, 
affectation  called  down  on  their  heads  a  ripple  of   laughter,  and 
their  endeavours  would  now  have  been  forgotten  but  for  the  im- 
mortal satire  of  IMoliere  in  Les  Precieuses  ridicules  and  Lcs  Femmes 
savantes.     But  apart  from  such  exaggerations  the  feminine  point 
of  view  is  unassailable,  and  there  is  reason  to  congratulate  those 
nations,  the  English  among  them,  in  which  the  social  position  of 
women  has  been  high  enough  to  secure  greater  purity  and  freedom 
from  coarseness  in  language  than  would  have  been  the  case  if 
men  had  been  the  sole  arbiters  of  speech. 

Among  the  things  women  object  to  in  language  must  be  specially 
mentioned  anything  that  smacks  of  swearing  ^ ;  where  a  man  will 

*  There  are  great  differences  with  regard  to  swearing  between  different 
nations ;  but  I  think  that  in  those  countries  and  in  those  circles  in  which 


§7]  CHOICE    OF    WORDS  247 

say  "  He  told  an  infernal  lie,"  a  womton  will  rather  say,  "  He  told 
a  most  dreadful  fib."  Such  euphemistic  substitutes  for  the  simple 
word  '  hell  '  as  '  the  other  place,'  '  a  very  hot '  or  '  a  very  uncom- 
fortable place  '  probabl}'  originated  with  women.  They  will  also 
use  ever  to  add  emphasis  to  an  interrogative  pronoun,  as  in 
"  Whoever  told  you  that  ?  "  or  "  Whatever  do  you  mean  ?  " 
and  avoid  the  stronger  '  who  the  devil  '  or  '  what  the  dickens.' 
For  surprise  we  have  the  feminine  exclamations  '  Good  gracious,' 
'  Gracious  me,'  '  Goodness  gracious,'  '  Dear  me  '  by  the  side  of  the 
more  masculine  '  Good  heavens,' '  Great  Scott.'  '  To  be  sure  '  is  said 
to  be  more  frequent  with  women  than  with  men.  Such  instances 
might  be  multiplied,  but  these  may  suffice  here.  It  will  easilj'  be 
seen  that  we  have  here  civilized  counterparts  of  what  was  above 
mentioned  as  sexual  tabu  ;  but  it  is  worth  noting  that  the  interdic- 
tion in  these  cases  is  ordained  by  the  women  themselves,  or  perhaps 
rather  by  the  older  among  them,  while  the  young  do  not  "always 
willingly  comply. 

Men  will  certainly  with  great  justice  object  that  there  is  a  danger 
of  the  language  becoming  languid  and  insipid  if  we  are  always  to 
content  ourselves  ^dth  women's  expressions,  and  that  vigour  and 
vividness  count  for  something.  Most  boys  and  many  men  have 
a  dislike  to  some  words  merelj'  because  they  feel  that  they  are  used 
by  everybody  and  on  every  occasion  :  they  want  to  avoid  what  is 
commonplace  and  banal  and  to  replace  it  by  new  and  fresh  ex- 
pressions, whose  very  newness  imparts  to  them  a  flavour  of  their 
OA\Ti.  Men  thus  become  the  chief  renovators  of  language,  and 
to  them  are  due  those  changes  by  which  we  sometimes  see  one 
term  replace  an  older  one,  to  give  wa}^  in  turn  to  a  still  newer  one,  and 
so  on.  Thus  we  see  in  English  that  the  old  verb  weorpan,  corre- 
sponding to  G.  werfen,  was  felt  as  too  weak  and  therefore  supplanted 
by  cast,  which  was  taken  from  Scandinavian  ;  after  some  centuries 
cast  was  replaced  by  the  stronger  thro^v,  and  this  now,  in  the  parlance 
of  boys  especially,  is  gi^ing  way  to  stronger  expressions  like  chuck 
and  fling.  The  old  verbs,  or  at  any  rate  cast,  may  be  retained  in 
certain  applications,  more  particularly  in  some  fixed  combinations 
and  in  figurative  significations,  but  it  is  now  hardly  possible  to  say, 
as  Shakespeare  does,  "  They  cast  their  caps  up."  Many  such 
innovations  on  their  first  appearance  are  counted  as  slang,  and 
some  never  make  their  -wa,y  into  received  speech  ;  but  I  am  not 
in  this  connexion  concerned  with  the  distinction  between  slang 

swearing  is  common  it  is  found  much  more  extensively  among  men  than 
among  women  :  this  at  any  rate  is  true  of  Denmark.  There  is,  however,  a 
general  social  movement  against  8\\eaiing.  and  now  there  are  many  men 
who  never  swear.  A  friend  wiites  to  me:  "The  best  English  men  haidly 
swear  at  all.  ...  I  imagine  some  of  our  fashionable  women  now  swear  as 
much  as  the  men  they  consort  with." 


248  THE   WOMAN  [ch.  xiii 

and  recognized  language,  except  in  so  far  as  the  inclination  or 
disinclination  to  invent  and  to  use  slang  is  undoubtedly  one  of  the 
"human  secondary  sexual  characters."  This  is  not  invalidated 
by  the  fact  that  quite  recently,  with  the  rise  of  the  feminist  move- 
ment, many  j'oung  ladies  have  begun  to  imitate  their  brothers  in 
that  as  well  as  in  other  respects. 


Xm.— §8.  Vocabulary. 

This  trait  is  indissolubly  connected  with  another  :  the  vocabulary 
of  a  woman  as  a  rule  is  much  less  extensive  than  that  of  a  man. 
Women  move  preferably  in  the  central  field  of  language,  avoiding 
everything  that  is  out  of  the  way  or  bizarre,  while  men  will  often 
either  coin  new  words  or  expressions  or  take  up  old-fashioned  ones, 
if  by  that  means  they  are  enabled,  or  think  they  are  enabled,  to 
find  a  more  adequate  or  precise  expression  for  their  thoughts. 
Woman  as  a  rule  follows  the  main  road  of  language,  where  man  is 
often  inclined  to  turn  aside  into  a  narrow  footpath  or  even  to  strike 
out  a  new  path  for  himself.  Most  of  those  who  are  in  the  habit 
of  reading  books  in  foreign  languages  will  have  experienced  a  much 
greater  average  difficulty  in  books  written  by  male  than  by  female 
authors,  because  they  contain  man}'  more  rare  words,  dialect  words, 
technical  terms,  etc.  Those  who  want  to  learn  a  foreign  language 
will  therefore  always  do  well  at  the  first  stage  to  read  many  ladies' 
novels,  because  they  will  there  continually  meet  ■with  just  those 
everyday  words  and  combinations  which  the  foreigner  is  above 
all  in  need  of,  what  may  be  termed  the  indispensable  small-change 
of  a  language. 

Tliis  may  be  partlj^  explicable  from  the  education  of  women, 
which  has  up  to  quite  recent  times  been  less  comprehensive  and 
technical  than  that  of  men.  But  this  does  not  account  for  every- 
thing, and  certain  experiments  made  by  the  American  professor 
Jastrow  would  tend  to  show  that  we  hav^e  here  a  trait  that  is  inde- 
pendent of  education.  He  asked  twenty-five  university  students 
of  each  sex,  belonging  to  the  same  class  and  thus  in  possession  of 
the  same  preliminary  training,  to  write  do\Mi  as  rapidly  as  possible  a 
hundred  words,  and  to  record  the  time.  Words  in  sentences  were 
not  allowed.  There  were  thus  obtained  5,000  words,  and  of  these 
many  were  of  course  the  same.  But  the  community  of  thought 
was  greater  in  the  women  ;  while  the  men  used  1,375  different 
words,  their  female  class-mates  used  only  1,123.  Of  1,266  unique 
words  used,  29-8  per  cent,  were  male,  only  20-8  per  cent,  female. 
The  group  into  which  the  largest  number  of  the  men's  words  fell 
was  the  animal  kingdom  ;  the  group  into  which  the  largest  number 
of  the  women's  words  fell  was  wearing  apparel  and  fabrics  ;   while 


§  8]  VOCABULARY  249 

the  men  used  only  53  words  belonging  to  the  class  of  foods,  the 
women  used  179.  "  In  general  the  feminine  traits  revealed  by 
this  study  are  an  attention  to  the  immediate  surroundings,  to  the 
finished  product,  to  the  ornamental,  the  individual,  and  the  con- 
crete ;  wliile  the  masculine  preference  is  for  the  more  remote,  the 
constructive,  the  useful,  the  general  and  the  abstract."  (See 
Havelock  Ellis,  3Ian  and  Wotnan,  4th  ed.,  London,  1904, 
p.  189.) 

Another  point  mentioned  by  Jastrow  is  the  tendency  to  select 
words  that  rime  and  alliterative  words  ;  both  these  tendencies 
were  decided]}-  more  marked  in  men  than  in  -women.  This  sbo-ws 
what  we  may  also  notice  in  other  ways,  that  men  take  greater 
interest  in  words  as  such  and  in  their  acoustic  properties,  while 
women  pay  less  attention  to  that  side  of  words  and  merely  take 
them  as  they  are,  as  something  given  once  for  all.  Thus  it  comes 
that  some  men  are  confirmed  punsters,  while  women  are  generally 
slow  to  see  any  point  in  a  pun  and  scarcely  ever  perpetrate  one 
themselves.  Or,  to  get  to  something  of  greater  value  :  the  science 
of  language  has  very  few  votaries  among  women,  in  spite  of  the 
fact  that  foreign  languages,  long  before  the  reform  of  female  educa- 
tion, belonged  to  those  things  which  women  learnt  best  in  and  out 
of  schools,  because,  like  music  and  embroidery,  they  were  reckoned 
among  the  specially  feminine  '  accomplishments.' 

Woman  is  linguistically  quicker  than  man  :  quicker  to  learn, 
quicker  to  hear,  and  quicker  to  answer.  A  man  is  slower :  he 
hesitates,  he  chews  the  cud  to  make  sure  of  the  taste  of  words,  and 
thereby  comes  to  discover  similarities  with  and  differences  from 
other  words,  both  in  sound  and  in  sense,  thus  preparing  himself 
for  the  appropriate  use  of  the  fittest  noun  or  adjective. 

Xm.— §  9.  Adverbs. 

While  there  are  a  few  adjectives,  such  as  pretty  and  nice,  that 
might  be  mentioned  as  used  more  extensively^  by  women  than  by 
men,  there  are  greater  differences  -with  regard  to  adverbs.  Lord 
Chesterfield  wrote  {The  World,  December  5,  1754)  :  "  Not  contented 
with  enricliing  our  language  by  words  absolutely  new,  my  fair 
countrjn^omen  have  gone  still  farther,  and  improved  it  by  the 
application  and  extension  of  old  ones  to  various  and  very  different 
significations.  They  take  a  word  and  change  it,  like  a  guinea  into 
shillings  for  pocket-money,  to  be  employed  in  the  several  occasional 
purposes  of  the  day.  For  instance,  the  adjective  vast  and  its 
adverb  vastly  mean  anything,  and  are  the  fashionable  words  of  the 
most  fashionable  people.  A  fine  woman  ...  is  vastly  obliged,  or 
vastly  ofifended,  vastly  glad,   or  vastly  sorry.     Large   objects  are 


/ 


250  THE  WOMAN  [ch.  xm 

vastly  great,  small  ones  are  vastly  little  ;  and  I  had  lately  the 
pleasure  to  hear  a  fine  woman  {jronounce,  by  a  happy  metonymy, 
a  very  small  gold  snuff-box,  that  was  produced  in  company, 
to  be  vastly  pretty,  because  it  was  so  vastly  little."  Even  if 
that  particular  adverb  to  wliich  Lord  Chesterfield  objected  has 
now  to  a  great  extent  gone  out  of  fashion,  there  is  no  doubt 
that  he  has  here  touched  on  a  distinctive  trait :  the  fondness  of 
women  for  hj^erbole  will  very  often  lead  the  fashion  with  regard 
to  adverbs  of  intensitj',  and  these  are  very  often  used  with  disregard 
of  their  proper  meaning,  as  in  German  riesir/  klcin,  English  avfully 
pretty,  terribly  nice,  French  rudement  joli,  affreusement  dtlicienx, 
Danish  rcedsom  morsom  (horribly  amusing),  Russian  strast'  kakoy 
lovkiy  (terribly  able),  etc.  Quite,  also,  in  the  sense  of  '  very,'  as 
in  '  she  was  quite  charming  ;  it  makes  me  quite  angry,'  is,  accord- 
ing to  Fitzedward  Hall,  due  to  the  ladies.  And  I  suspect  that  jxist 
sweet  (as  in  Barrie  :  "  Grizol  thought  it  was  just  sweet  of  him  ") 
is  equally  characteristic  of  the  usage  of  the  fair  sex. 

There  is  another  intensive  which  has  also  something  of  the 
eternally  feminine  about  it,  namely  so.  I  am  indebted  to  Stoffel 
(Int.  101)  for  the  following  quotation  from  Punch  (January  4, 
1896)  :  "  This  little  adverb  is  a  great  favourite  with  ladies,  in  con- 
junction vaih.  an  adjective.  For  instance,  they  are  very  fond  of 
using  such  exjjressions  as  '  He  is  so  charming  !  '  'It  is  so  lovely  !  ' 
etc."  Stoffel  adds  the  following  instances  of  strongly  intensive 
so  as  highly  characteristic  of  ladies'  usage  :  '  Thank  you  so  much  !  ' 
'  It  was  so  kind  of  you  to  think  of  it  ! '  '  That's  so  like  you  !  ' 
'  I'm  so  glad  you've  come  !  '    '  The  bonnet  is  so  lovely  !  ' 

The  explanation  of  this  characteristic  feminine  usage  is,  I  think, 
that  women  much  more  often  than  men  break  oft'  without  finishing 
their  sentences,  because  they  start  talking  without  having  thought 
out  what  they  are  going  to  say  ;  the  sentence  '  I'm  so  glad  you've 
come '  reall}'  requires  some  complement  in  the  shape  of  a  clause 
vrith  that,  '  so  glad  that  I  really  must  kiss  you,'  or,  '  so  glad  that  I 
must  treat  you  to  something  extra,'  or  whatever  the  consequence 
may  be.  But  very  often  it  is  difficult  in  a  hurry  to  hit  upon  some- 
thing adequate  to  say,  and  '  so  glad  that  I  cannot  express  it ' 
frequently  results  in  the  inexpressible  remaining  unexpressed,  and 
when  that  experiment  has  been  repeated  time  after  time,  the  lin- 
guistic consequence  is  that  a  strongly  stressed  so  acquires  the  force 
of  •  very  much  indeed.'  It  is  the  same  Math  sttch,  as  in  the 
following  two  extracts  from  a  modern  novel  (in  both  it  is  a  lady 
who  is  speaking)  :  "  Poor  Kitty  !  she  has  been  in  such  a  state  of 
mind,"  and  "  Do  you  know  that  you  look  such  a  duck  this  afternoon. 
.  .  .  This  hat  suits  you  so — vou  are  such  a  grande  dame  in  it." 
Exactly  the  same  thing  has  happened  with  Danish  sd  and  sddan, 


§9]  ADVERBS  251 

G.  so  and  solch  ;   also  with  French  iellemetit,  though  there  x>erhaps 
not  to  the  same  extent  as  in  EngHsh. 

We  have  the  same  phenomenon  with  to  a  degree,  which  properly 
requires  to  be  supplemented  with  something  that  tells  us  what 
the  degree  is,  but  is  frequently  left  by  itself,  as  in  '  His  second 
marriage  was  irregular  to  a  degree.* 


Xm.— §  10.  Periods. 

Tlie  frequency  with  which  women  thus  leave  their  exclamatory 
sentences  half-finished  might  be  exemplified  from  many  passages 
in  our  novelists  and  dramatists.  I  select  a  few  quotations. 
The  first  is  from  the  beginning  of  Vanity  Fair  :  "  This  almost  caused 
Jemima  to  faint  with  terror.  '  Well,  I  never,'  said  she.  '  What 
an  audacious  ' — emotion  prevented  her  from  completing  either 
sentence."  Next  from  one  of  Hankin's  plays.  "Mrs.  Eversleigh  : 
I  must  say  !  (but  words  fail  her)."  And  finally  from  Compton 
Mackenzie's  Poor  Relations  :  "  '  The  trouble  you  must  have  taken,' 
Hilda  exclaimed."  These  quotations  illustrate  types  of  sentences 
which  are  becoming  so  frequent  that  they  would  seem  soon  to 
deserve  a  separate  chapter  in  modern  grammars,  '  Did  you  ever  ?  * 
'  Well,  I  never  !  '  being  perhaps  the  most  important  of  these 
'  stop-short '  or  '  pull-uj) '  sentences,  as  I  think  they  might  be 
termed. 

These  sentences  are  the  linguistic  sjTnptoms  of  a  peculiarity 
of  feminine  psychology  which  has  not  escaped  observation.  Mere- 
dith says  of  one  of  his  heroines  :  "  She  thought  in  blanks,  as  girls 
do,  and  some  women,"  and  Hardy  singularizes  one  of  his  by  calling 
her  "  that  novelty  among  women — one  who  finished  a  thought 
before  beginning  the  sentence  which  was  to  convey  it." 

The  same  point  is  seen  in  the  typical  way  in  which  the  two 
sexes  build  up  their  sentences  and  periods  ;  but  here,  as  so  often 
in  this  chapter,  we  cannot  establish  absolute  differences,  but 
only  preferences  that  may  be  broken  in  a  great  many  instances 
and  yet  are  characteristic  of  the  sexes  as  such.  If  we  compare 
long  periods  as  constructed  by  men  and  by  women,  we  shall  in  the 
former  find  many  more  instances  of  intricate  or  involute  structures 
with  clause  within  clause,  a  relative  clause  in  the  middle  of  a  con- 
ditional clause  or  vice  versa,  T\ith  subordination  and  sub-subordina- 
tion, while  the  typical  form  of  long  feminine  periods  is  that  of 
co-ordination,  one  sentence  or  clause  being  added  to  another  on  the 
same  plane  and  the  gradation  between  the  respective  ideas  being 
marked  not  grammatically,  but  emotionally,  by  stress  and  intona- 
tion, and  in  writing  by  underlining.  In  learned  terminology  we 
may  say  that  men  are  fond  of  hypotaxis  and  women  of  parataxis. 


252  THE   WOMAN  [ch.  xiii 

Or  we  may  use  the  simile  that  a  male  period  is  often  like  a  set  of 
Chinese  boxes,  one  ^nthin  another,  while  a  feminine  period  is  like 
a  set  of  pearls  joined  together  on  a  string  of  ancls  and  similar  words. 
In  a  Danish  comedy  a  young  girl  is  relating  what  has  happened 
to  her  at  a  ball,  when  she  is  suddenly  interrupted  by  her  brother, 
who  has  slyly  taken  out  his  watch  and  now  exclaims  :  "  I  declare  ! 
you  have  said  and  then  fifteen  times  in  less  than  two  and  a  half 
minutes." 

Xm. — §  11.  General  Characteristics. 

The  greater  rapidity  of  female  thought  is  shoATO  linguistically, 
among  other  tnings,  by  the  frequency  with  which  a  woman  will  use 
a  pronoun  like  he  or  she,  not  of  the  person  last  mentioned,  but 
of  somebody  else  to  whom  her  thoughts  have  already  wandered, 
while  a  man  with  his  slower  intellect  will  tliink  that  she  is  still 
moving  on  the  same  path.  The  difference  in  rapidity  of  perception 
has  been  tested  experimentally  by  Romanes  :  the  same  paragraph 
was  presented  to  various  well-educated  persons,  who  were  asked 
to  read  it  as  rapidly  as  they  could,  ten  seconds  being  allowed  for 
twenty  lines.  As  soon  as  the  time  was  up  the  ])aragraph  was 
removed,  and  the  reader  immediately  wTote  down  all  that  he  or 
she  could  remember  of  it.  It  was  found  that  women  were  usually 
more  successful  than  men  in  this  test.  Not  only  were  they  able 
to  read  more  quickly  than  the  men,  but  they  were  able  to  give  a 
better  account  of  the  paragraph  as  a  whole.  One  lady,  for  instance, 
could  read  exactly  four  times  as  fast  as  her  husband,  and  even 
then  give  a  better  account  than  he  of  that  small  portion  of  the 
paragraph  he  had  alone  been  able  to  read.  But  it  was  found  that 
this  rapidity  was  no  jjroof  of  intellectual  power,  and  some  of  the 
slowest  readers  were  highly  distinguished  men.  Ellis  {Man  and  W. 
195)  explains  this  in  this  way  :  with  the  quick  reader  it  is  as  though 
every  statement  were  admitted  immediately  and  without  inspection 
to  fill  the  vacant  chambers  of  the  mind,  while  with  the  slow  reader 
every  statement  undergoes  an  instinctive  process  of  cross-examina- 
tion ;  every  new  fact  seems  to  stir  up  the  accumulated  stores  of 
facts  among  which  it  intrudes,  and  so  impedes  rapidity  of  mental 
action. 

This  reminds  me  of  one  of  Swift's  "  Thoughts  on  Various  Sub- 
jects " :  "  The  common  fluency  of  speech  in  many  men,  and  most 
women,  is  owing  to  the  scarcity  of  matter,  and  scarcity  of  w  ords  ;  for 
whoever  is  a  master  of  language,  and  hath  a  mind  full  of  ideas,  will 
be  apt  in  speaking  to  hesitate  upon  the  choice  of  both  :  whereas 
common  speakers  have  only  one  set  of  ideas,  and  one  set  of  words 
to  clothe  them  in  ;  and  these  are  always  ready  at  the  mouth.    So 


§11]  GENERAL   CIURACTERISTICS  253 

people  come  faster  out  of  a  church  when  it  is  almost  empty,  than 
when  a  crowd  is  at  the  door  "  {Works,  Dubhn,  1735,  i.  305). 

The  volubihty  of  women  has  been  the  subject  of  innumerable 
jests  :  it  has  given  rise  to  popular  proverbs  in  many  countries,^  as 
well  as  to  Aurora  Leigh's  resigned  "  A  woman's  function  plainly 
is — to  talk  "  and  Oscar  Wilde's  sneer,  "  Women  are  a  decorative 
sex.  They  never  have  anything  to  say,  but  they  say  it  charmingl3^" 
A  woman's  thougiit  is  no  sooner  formed  than  uttered.  Says  Rosa- 
lind, "  Do  you  not  know  I  am  a  woman  ?  when  I  think,  I  must 
speak  "  {As  You  Like  It,  in.  2.  264).  And  in  a  modern  novel  a 
young  girl  says  :  "  I  talk  so  as  to  find  out  what  I  think.  Don't 
j'ou  ?  Some  things  one  can't  judge  of  till  one  hears  them  spoken  " 
(Housman,  John  of  Jingalo,  346). 

The  superior  readiness  of  speech  of  women  is  a  concomitant 
of  the  fact  that  their  vocabulary  is  smaller  and  more  central  than 
tJiat  of  men.  But  this  again  is  connected  with  another  indubitable 
fact,  that  women  do  not  reach  the  same  extreme  points  as  men, 
but  are  nearer  the  average  in  most  respects.  Havelock  Ellis, 
who  establishes  this  in  various  fields,  rightly  remarks  that  the 
statement  that  geniiis  is  imdeniably  of  more  frequent  occurrence 
among  men  than  among  women  has  sometimes  been  regarded 
by  women  as  a  slur  upon  their  sex,  but  that  it  does  not  appear 
that  women  have  been  equally  anxious  to  find  fallacies  in  the 
statement  that  idiocy  is  more  common  among  men.  Yet  the 
two  statements  must  be  taken  together.  Genius  is  more  common 
among  men  by  virtue  of  the  same  general  tendency  by  which  idiocy 
is  more  common  among  men.  The  two  facts  are  but  two  aspects 
of  a  larger  zoological  fact — the  greater  variability  of  the  male 
{Man  mvi.  IF.  420). 

In  language  we  see  this  very  clearly  :  the  highest  linguistic 
genius  and  the  lowest  degree  of  linguistic  imbecility  are  very 
rarely  found  among  women.  The  greatest  orators,  the  most 
famous  literary  artists,  have  been  men  ;  but  it  may  serve  as  a 
sort  of  consolation  to  the  other  sex  that  there  are  a  much  greater 
number  of  men  than  of  women  who  cannot  put  two  words  together 
intelligibly,  who  stutter  and  stammer  and  hesitate,  and  are  unable 
to  find  suitable  expressions  for  the  simplest  thought.  Between 
these  two  extremes  the  woman  moves  with  a  sure  and  supple  tongue 
which  is  ever  ready  to  find  words  and  to  pronounce  them  in  a  clear 
and  intelligible  manner. 

1  "  Ou  femme  y  a,  silence  n'y  a."  "Deux  femmes  font  un  plaid,  troia 
un  grand  caquet,  quatre  un  plein  march^."  "  Due  donne  e  un'  oca  fanno 
una  fiera "  (Venice).  "  The  tongue  is  the  sword  of  a  woman,  and  she 
never  lets  it  become  rusty"  (China).  "The  North  Sea  vn\\  sooner  be  found 
wanting  in  water  than  a  woman  at  a  loss  for  a  word"  (Jutland). 


254  THE  WOMAN  [ch.  xiii 

Nor  are  the  reasons  far  to  seek  why  such  differences  should  have 
developed.  They  are  mainly  dependent  on  the  division  of  labour 
enjoined  in  primitive  tribes  and  to  a  great  extent  also  among  more 
civilized  peoples  For  thousands  of  years  the  work  that  especially 
fell  to  men  was  such  as  demanded  an  intense  display  of  energy 
for  a  comparatively  short  period,  mainly  in  war  and  in  hunting. 
Here,  however,  there  was  not  much  occasion  to  talk,  nay,  in  many 
circumstances  talk  might  even  be  fraught  with  danger.  And  when 
that  rough  work  was  over,  the  man  would  either  sleep  or  idle  his 
time  away,  inert  and  torpid,  more  or  less  in  silence.  Woman, 
on  the  other  hand,  had  a  number  of  domestic  occupations  which 
did  not  claim  such  an  enormous  output  of  spasmodic  energy.  To 
her  was  at  first  left  not  only  agriculture,  and  a  great  deal  of  other 
work  which  in  more  peaceful  times  was  taken  over  by  men  ;  but 
also  much  that  has  been  till  quite  recently  her  almost  exclusive 
concern — the  care  of  the  children,  cooking,  brewing,  baking,  sewing, 
washing,  etc., — things  which  for  the  most  part  demanded  no  deep 
thought,  which  were  performed  in  company  and  could  well  be 
accompanied  with  a  lively  chatter.  Lingering  effects  of  this  state 
of  things  are  seen  still,  though  great  social  changes  are  going  on 
in  our  times  Avhich  may  eventually  modify  even  the  linguistic 
relations  of  the  two  sexes. 


CHAPTER   XIV 
CAUSES    OF    CHANGE 

§  1.  Anatomy.  §  2.  Geography.  §  3.  National  Psychology.  §  4.  Speed  of 
Utterance.  §  5.  Periods  of  Rapid  Change.  §  6.  The  Ease  Theory. 
§  7.  Sounds  in  Connected  Speech.  §  8.  Extreme  Weakenings.  §  9.  The 
Principle  of  VaUie.  §10.  Application  to  Case  System,  etc.  §11.  Stress 
Phenomena.     §  12.  Non-phonetic  Changes. 

XIV.— §  1.  Anatomy. 

In^  accordance  with  the  programme  laid  down  in  the  opening 
paragraph  of  Book  III,  we  shall  now  deal  in  detail  with  those 
linguistic  changes  which  are  not  due  to  transference  to  new 
individuals.  The  chapter  on  woman's  language  has  served  as 
a  kind  of  bridge  between  the  two  main  divisions,  in  so  far  as  the 
first  sections  treated  of  those  women's  dialects  which  were,  or 
were  supposed  to  be,  due  to  the  influence  of  foreigners. 

Many  theories  have  been  advanced  to  explain  the  indubitable 
fact  that  languages  change  in  course  of  time.  Some  scholars 
have  thought  that  there  ought  to  be  one  fundamental  cause 
working  in  all  instances,  while  others,  more  sensibly,  have 
maintained  that  a  variety  of  causes  have  been  and  are  at  work, 
and  that  it  is  not  easy  to  determine  which  of  them  has  been 
decisive  in  each  observed  case  of  change.  The  greatest  attention 
has  been  given  to  phonetic  change,  and  in  reading  some  theorists 
one  might  almost  fancy  that  sounds  were  the  only  thing  change- 
able, or  at  any  rate  that  phonetic  changes  were  the  only  ones  in 
language  which  had  to  be  accounted  for.  Let  us  now  examine 
some  of  the  theories  advanced. 

Sometimes  it  is  asserted  that  sound  changes  must  have  their 
cause  in  changes  in  the  anatomical  structure  of  the  articulating 
organs.  This  theory,  however,  need  not  detain  us  long  (see  the 
able  discussion  in  Oertel,  p.  194  £f.),  for  no  facts  have  been 
alleged  to  support  it,  and  one  does  not  see  why  small  anatomical 
variations  should  cause  changes  so  long  as  any  teacher  of 
languages  on  the  phonetic  method  is  able  to  teach  his  pupils 
practically  every  speech  sound,  even  those  that  their  own  native 
language  has  been  without  for  centuries.  Besides,  many  phonetic 
changes  do  not  at  all  lead  to  new  sounds  being  developed  or  old 

,255 


256  CAUSES  OF  CHANGE  [ch.  xiv 

ones  lost,  but  8imj)ly  to  the  old  sounds  being  used  in  new  places 
or  disused  in  some  of  the  places  where  they  were  formerly  found. 
Some  tribes  have  a  custom  of  mutilating  their  lips  or  teeth, 
and  that  of  course  must  have  caused  changes  in  their  pro- 
nunciation, which  are  said  to  have  persisted  even  after  the 
custom  was  given  up.  Thus,  according  to  Mcinhof  (MSA 
60)  the  Yao  women  insert  a  big  wooden  disk  within  the  upper 
lip,  which  makes  it  impossible  for  them  to  pronounce  [f],  and 
as  it  is  the  women  that  teach  their  children  to  speak,  the  soimd 
of  [f]  has  disappeared  from  the  language,  though  now  it  is 
beginning  to  reappear  in  loan-words.  It  is  clear,  however,  that 
such  customs  can  have  exercised  only  the  very  slightest  influence 
on  language  in  general. 

XIV.— §2.  Geography. 

Some  scholars  have  believed  in  an  influence  exercised  by  climatic 
or  geographical  conditions  on  the  character  of  the  sound  sj'stem, 
instancing  as  evidence  the  harsh  consonants  found  in  the  languages 
of  the  Caucasus  as  contrasted  with  the  pleasanter  sounds  heard 
in  regions  more  favoured  by  nature.  But  this  influence  cannot 
be  established  as  a  general  rule.  "The  aboriginal  inhabitants 
of  the  north-west  coast  of  America  foimd  subsistence  relatively 
easy  in  a  country  abounding  in  many  forms  of  edible  marine  life ; 
nor  can  they  be  said  to  have  been  subjected  to  rigorous  chmatic 
conditions  ;  yet  in  phonetic  harshness  their  languages  rival  those 
of  the  Caucasus.  On  the  other  hand,  perhaps  no  people  has 
ever  been  subjected  to  a  more  forbidding  physical  environment 
than  the  Eskimos,  yet  the  Eskimo  language  not  only  impresses 
one  as  possessed  of  a  relatively  agreeable  phonetic  system  when 
compared  with  the  languages  of  the  north-west  coast,  but  may  even 
be  thought  to  compare  favourably  with  American  Indian  languages 
generally "  (Sapir,  American  Anthrojjologist,  XIV  (1912),  234). 
It  would  also  on  this  theory  be  difficult  to  account  for  the 
very  considerable  linguistic  changes  which  have  taken  place  in 
historical  times  in  many  countries  whose  climate,  etc.,  cannot 
during  the  same  period  have  changed  correspondingly. 

A  geographical  theory  of  sound -shifting  was  advanced  by 
Heinrich  Meyer-Benfey  in  Zeitschr.  f.  deutsches  Altcrt.  45  (1901), 
and  has  recently'-  been  taken  up  by  H,  Collitz  in  Amer.  Journal 
of  Philol.  39  (1918),  p.  413.  Consonant  shifting  is  chiefly  found 
in  mountain  regions  ;  this  is  most  obvious  in  the  High  German 
shift,  which  started  from  the  Alpine  district  of  Southern  Germany. 
After  leaving  the  region  of  the  high  mountains  it  gradually 
decreases  in  strength ;    yet  it  keeps  on  extending,  with  steadily 


§2]  GEOGRAPHY  257 

diminishing  energy,  over  part  of  the  area  of  the  Franconian  dialects. 
But  having  reached  the  plains  of  Northern  German}',  the  movement 
stops.     The  same  theory  applies  to  languages  in  which  a  similar 
shifting  is  found,  e.g.  Old  and  Modern   Armenian,  the  Soho  lan- 
guage in  South   Africa,   etc.     "  However  strange  it  may  appear 
at  the  first  glance,"  says  Collitz,  "  that  certain  consonant  changes 
should   depend   on  geographical  surroundings,   the  connexion   is 
easily  understood.     The  change   of   media  to  tenuis  and  that  of 
tenuis  to  affricate  or  aspirate  are  linked  together  by  a  common 
feature,  viz.  an  increase  in  the  intensity  of  expiration.     As  the 
common  cause  of  both  these  shiftings  we  may  therefore  regard 
a  change  in  the  manner  in  which  breath  is  used  for  pronunciation. 
The  habitual  use  of  a  larger  volume  of  breath  means  an  increased 
activity  of  the  lungs.    Here  we  have  reached  the  point  where 
the  connexion  with  geographical  or  chmatic  conditions  is  clear, 
because  nobody  will  den}-  that  residence  in  the  mountains,  especially 
in  the  high  mountains,  stimulates  the  lungs." 

When  this  theory  was  first  brought  to  my  notice,  I  wrote  a 
short  footnote  on  it  (PhG  176),  in  which  I  treated  it  with  perhaps 
too  little  respect,  merely  mentioning  the  fact  that  my  countrymen, 
the  Danes,,  in  their  flat  country  were  developing  exactly  the  same 
shift  as  the  High  Germans  (making  p,  t,  k  into  strongly  aspirated 
or  afifricated  sounds  and  unvoicing  b,  d,  g)  ;   I  then  asked  ironically 
whether  that  might  be  a  consequence  of  the  indubitable  fact  that 
an  increasing  number  of  Danes  every  summer  go  to  Switzerland 
and  Norway  for  their  holidays.    And  even  now,  after  the  theory 
has  been  endorsed  by  so  able  an  advocate  as  Collitz,  I  fail  to 
see  how  it  can  hold  water.    The  induction  seems  faulty  on  both 
sides,  for  the  shift  is  foimd  among  peoples  li\ang  in  plains,  and 
on  the  other  hand  it  is  not  shared  by  all  mountain  peoples — for 
example,  not  by  the  Italian  and  Ladin  speaking  neighbours  of 
the  High  Germans  in  the  Alps.     Besides,  the  physiological  explana- 
tion is  not  impeccable,  for  walking  in  the  mountains  affects  the 
way  in  which  we  breathe,  that  is,  it  primarilj-  affects  the  lungs, 
but  the  change  in  the  consonants  is  primarily  one  not  in  the  lungs, 
but  in  the  glottis  ;    as  the  connexion  between  these  two  things 
is  not  necessary,  the  whole  reasoning  is  far  from  being  cogent. 
At  any  rate,  the  theory  can  only  with  great  difficulty  be  applied 
to  the  first  Gothonic  shift,  for  how  do  we  know  that  that  started 
in  mountainous  regions  ?    and  who  Icnows  whether  the  sounds 
actually  found  as  /,  ]>  and  h  for  original  p,  f,  k,  had  first  been 
aspirated  and  affricated  stops  ?    It  seems  much  more  probable 
that  the  transition  was  a  direct  one,  through  slackening  and  opening 
of  the  stoppage,  but  in  that  case  it  has  nothing  to  do  with  the 
lungs  or  way  of  breathing. 

17 


258  CAUSES   OF  CHANGE  [ch.  xiv 

XIV.— §  3.  National  Psychology. 

We  are  much  more  Ukely  to  '  burn,'  as  the  children  sa}',  when, 
instead  of  looking  for  the  cause  in  such  outward  circumstances,  we 
try  to  find  it  in  the  psychology  of  those  who  initiate  the  change. 
But  this  does  not  amount  to  endorsing  all  the  explanations  of 
this  kind  which  have  found  favour  with  linguists.  Thus,  since 
the  times  of  Grimm  it  has  been  usual  to  ascribe  the  well-known 
consonant  shift  to  psychological  traits  believed  to  be  characteristic 
of  the  Germans.  Grimm  says  that  the  sound  shift  is  a  consequence 
of  the  progressive  tendency  and  desire  of  liberty  found  in  the 
Germans  (GDS  292)  ;  it  is  due  to  their  courage  and  pride  in 
the  period  of  the  great  migration  of  tribes  (ib.  306)  :  '*  When 
quiet  and  morality  returned,  the  sounds  remained,  and  it  may 
be  reckoned  as  evidence  of  the  superior  gentleness  and  modera- 
tion of  the  Gothic,  Saxon  and  Scandinavian  tribes  that  they 
contented  themselves  with  the  first  shift,  while  the  wilder  force 
of  the  High  Germans  was  impelled  to  the  second  shift."  (Thus 
also  Westphal.)  Curtius  finds  energy  and  juvenile  vigour  in 
the  Germanic  sound  shift  (KZ  2.  331,  1852).  Mullenhof  saw  in 
the  transition  from  p,  t,  k  to  f,  ]>,  h  &  sign  of  weakening,  the 
Germans  having  apparently  lost  the  power  of  pronouncing  the 
hard  stops  ;  while  further,  the  giving  up  of  the  aspirated  ph,  ih,  kh, 
bhy  clh,  gh  was  due  to  enervation  or  indolence.  But  the  succeeding 
transition  from  the  old  b,  d,  g  to  p,  t,  k  showed  that  they  had 
afterwards  pulled  themselves  together  to  new  exertions,  and 
the  regularity  with  which  all  these  changes  were  carried  through 
evidenced  a  great  steadiness  and  persevering  force  {Deutsche  AlUr- 
tumsk.  2.  197).  His  disciple  Wilhelm  Scherer  saw  in  the  whole 
history  of  the  German  language  alternating  periods  of  rise  and 
decline  in  popular  taste  ;  he  looked  upon  sound  changes  from 
the  aesthetic  point  of  view  and  ascribed  the  (second)  consonant 
shift  to  a  feminine  period  in  which  consonants  were  neglected 
because  the  nation  took  pleasure  in  vocalic  sounds. 

XIV.— §  4.  Speed  o£  Utterance. 

Wundt  gives  a  different  though  somewhat  related  explanation 
of  the  Germanic  shift  as  due  to  a  "  revolution  in  culture,  as 
the  subjugation  of  a  native  population  through  warlike  immi- 
grants, with  resulting  new  organization  of  the  State  "  (S  1.  424)  : 
this  increased  the  speed  of  utterance,  and  he  tries  in  detail  to 
show  that  increased  speed  leads  naturallj''  to  just  those  changes 
in  consonants  which  are  found  in  the  Gothonic  shift  (1.  420  ff.). 
But  even  if  we  admit  that  the  average  speed  of  talking  (tempo 


§4]  SPEED   OF  UTTERANCE  259 

der  rede)  is  now  probably  greater  than  formerly,  the  whole  theory 
is  built  up  on  so  man}'-  doubtful  or  even  manifestly  incorrect 
details  both  in  linguistic  history  and  in  general  phonetic  theory 
that  it  cannot  be  accepted.  It  does  not  account  for  the  actual 
facts  of  the  consonant  shifts  ;  moreover,  it  is  difficult  to  see  why 
such  phenomena  as  this  shift,  if  they  were  dependent  on  the  speed 
of  utterance,  should  occur  only  at  these  particular  historical  times 
and  within  comparatively  ntirrow  geographical  limits,  for  there 
is  much  to  be  said  for  the  view  that  in  all  periods  the  speech 
of  the  Western  nations  has  been  constantly  gaining  in  rapidity 
as  life  in  general  has  become  accelerated,  and  in  no  period  prob- 
ably more  than  during  the  last  century,  which  has  witnessed  no 
radical  consonant  shift  in  any  of  the  leading  civilized  nations. 

XIV.— §  5.  Periods  of  Rapid  Change. 

All  these  theories,  different  though  they  are  in  detail,  have 
this  in  common,  that  they  endeavour  to  explain  one  particular 
change,  or  set  of  changes,  from  one  particular  psychological  trait 
supposed  to  be  prevalent  at  the  time  when  the  change  took  place, 
but  they  fail  because  we  are  not  able  scientifically  to  demonstrate 
any  intimate  connexion  between  the  pronunciation  of  particular 
sounds  and  a  certain  state  of  mind,  and  also  because  our  knowledge 
of  the  fluctuations  of  collective  psychology  is  still  so  very  imperfect. 
But  it  is  interesting  to  contrast  these  theories  with  the  explanation 
of  the  very  same  sound  shifts  mentioned  in  a  previous  chapter 
(XI),  and  there  shown  to  be  equally  unsatisfactory,  the  explanation, 
namely,  that  the  fundamental  cause  of  the  consonant  shift  is  to 
be  found  in  the  peculiar  pronimciation  of  an  aboriginal  population. 
In  both  cases  the  Gothonic  shifts  are  singled  out,  because  since 
the  time  of  Grimm  the  attention  of  scholars  has  been  focused 
on  these  changes  more  than  on  any  others — they  are  looked  upon 
as  changes  sui  generis,  and  therefore  requiring  a  special  explanation, 
such  as  is  not  thought  necessary  in  the  case  of  the  innumerable 
minor  changes  that  fill  most  of  the  pages  of  the  phonological 
section  of  any  historical  grammar.  But  the  sober  truth  seems 
to  be  that  these  shifts  are  not  difi!erent  in  kind  from  those  that 
have  made,  say,  Fr,  seve,  frere,  chien,  del,  faire,  changer  out  of 
Lat.  sapa,  fratrem,  canem,  kcelum,  fakere,  cambiare,  etc.,  or  those 
that  have  changed  the  English  vowels  in  fate,  feet,  fight,  foot,  out 
from  what  they  were  when  the  letters  which  denote  them  still 
had  their  'continental'  values.  Our  main  endeavour,  therefore, 
must  be  to  find  out  general  reasons  why  sounds  should  not 
always  remain  unchanged.  This  seems  more  important,  at  any 
rate   as    a   preliminary   investigation,    than   attempting   offhand 


260  CAUSES   OF  CHANGE  [ch.  xiv 

to  assign  particular  reasons  why  in  such  and  such  a  century 
this  or  that  sound  was  changed  in  some  particular  way. 

If,  however,  we  find  a  particular  period  especially  fertile  in 
linguistic  changes  (phonetic,  morphological,  semantic,  or  all  at 
once),  it  is  quite  natural  that  we  should  turn  our  attention  to 
the  social  state  of  the  community  at  that  time  in  order,  if  possible, 
to  discover  some  specially  favouring  circumstances.  I  am  thinking 
especially  of  two  kinds  of  condition  which  may  operate.  In  the 
first  place,  the  influence  of  parents,  and  grown-up  people  generallj', 
ma}'  be  less  than  usual,  because  an  unusual  number  of  parents 
may  be  away  from  home,  as  in  great  wars  of  long  duration, 
or  may  have  been  killed  off,  as  in  the  great  plagues  ;  cf .  also  what 
was  said  above  of  children  left  to  shift  for  themselves  in  certain 
favoured  regions  of  North  America  (Ch.  X  §  7).  Secondly,  there 
may  be  periods  in  which  the  ordinary  restraints  on  linguistic 
change  make  themselves  less  felt  than  usual,  because  the  whole 
community  is  animated  by  a  strong  feeling  of  independence  and 
wants  to  break  loose  from  social  ties  of  many  kinds,  including 
those  of  a  powerful  school  organization  or  literary  tradition. 
This  probably  was  the  case  with  North  America  in  the  latter 
half  of  the  eighteenth  century,  when  the  new  nation  wished  to 
manifest  its  independence  of  old  England  and  therefore,  among 
other  things,  was  inclined  to  throw  overboard  that  respect  for 
linguistic  authority  which  under  normal  conditions  makes  for 
conservatism.  If  the  divergence  between  American  and  British 
English  is  not  greater  than  it  actually  is,  this  is  probably  due 
partly  to  the  continual  influx  of  immigrants  from  the  old  country, 
and  parti}'  to  that  increased  faciUty  of  communication  between 
the  two  countries  in  recent  times  which  has  made  mutual  lin- 
guistic influence  possible  to  an  extent  formerly  undreamt-of. 
But  in  the  case  of  the  Romanic  languages  both  of  the  conditions 
mentioned  were  operating  :  during  the  centuries  in  which  they 
were  framed  and  underwent  the  strongest  differentiation,  wars  with 
the  intruding  '  barbarians  '  and  a  series  of  destructive  plagues 
kept  away  or  killed  a  great  many  growTi-up  people,  and  at  the 
same  time  each  country  released  itself  from  the  centralizing  in- 
fluence of  Rome,  which  in  the  first  centuries  of  the  Christian  era 
had  been  very  powerful  in  keeping  up  a  fairly  uniform  and  con- 
servative pronunciation  and  phraseology  throughout  the  whole 
Empire.^  There  were  thus  at  that  time  various  forces  at  work 
which,  taken  together,  are  quite  sufficient  to  explain  the  wide 

*  The  uniformitj'^  in  the  speech  of  the  whole  Roman  Empire  during  the 
first  centuries  of  our  Christian  era  was  kept  up,  among  other  things,  through 
the  habit  of  removing  soldiers  and  officials  from  one  country  to  the  other. 
This  ceased  later,  each  district  being  left  to  shift  more  or  less  for  itself. 


§5]  PERIODS   OF   RAPID   CHANGE  261 

divergence  in  linguistic  structure  that  separated  French,  Proven9al, 
Spanish,  etc.,  from  classical  Latin  (cf.  above.  XI  §  8,  p.  206). 

In  the  history  of  English,  one  of  the  periods  most  fertile  in 
change  is  the  fourteenth  and  fifteenth  centuries  :  the  wars  with 
France,  the  Black  Death  (which  is  said  to  have  killed  off  about 
one-third  of  the  population)  and  similar  pestilences,  insurrections 
like  those  of  Wat  Tyler  and  Jack  Cade,  civil  wars  like  those  of 
the  Ro.ses,  decimated  the  men  and  made  home-life  difficult  and 
unsettled.  In  the  Scandinavian  languages  the  Viking  age  is  prob- 
ably the  period  that  witnessed  the  greatest  linguistic  changes 
— if  I  am  right,  not,  as  has  sometimes  been  said,  on  account  of 
the  heroic  character  of  the  period  and  the  violent  rise  in  self- 
respect  or  self-assertion,  but  for  the  more  prosaic  reason  that 
the  men  were  absent  and  the  women  had  other  things  to  attend 
to  than  their  childi'en's  linguistic  education.  I  am  also  inchned 
to  think  that  the  unparalleled  rapidity  \vith  which,  during  the 
last  hundred  years,  the  vulgar  speech  of  Enghsh  cities  has  been 
differentiated  from  the  language  of  the  educated  classes  (nearly 
all  long  vowels  being  shifted,  etc.)  finds  its  natural  explanation 
in  the  unexampled  misery  of  child-life  among  industrial  workers 
in  the  first  half  of  the  last  century — one  of  the  most  disgraceful 
blots  on  our  overpraised  ci\'ilization. 

XIV.— §  6.  The  Ease  Theory. 

If  we  now  turn  to  the  actuating  principles  that  determine 
the  general  changeability  of  human  speech  habits,  we  shall  find 
that  the  moving  power  everywhere  is  an  impetus  starting  from 
the  individual,  and  that  there  is  a  curbing  power  in  the  mere  fact 
that  language  exists  not  for  the  individual  alone,  but  for  the 
whole  community.  The  whole  history  of  language  is,  as  it  w^ere, 
a  tug-of-war  between  these  two  principles,  each  of  which  gains 
victories  in  turn. 

First  of  all  we  must  make  up  our  minds  with  regard  to  the 
disputed  question  whether  the  changes  of  language  go  in  the 
direction  of  greater  ease,  in  other  words,  whether  they  manifest 
a  tendency  towards  economy  of  effort.  The  prevalent  opinion 
among  the  older  school  was  that  the  chief  tendency  was,  in 
Whitney's  words,  "  to  make  things  easy  to  our  organs  of  speech, 
to  economize  time  and  effort  in  the  work  of  expression  "  (L  28). 
Curtius  very  emphatically  states  that  "  Bequemlichkeit  ist  und 
bleibt  der  hauptanlass  des  lautwandels  unter  alien  umstanden  " 
{Griech.  etym.  23 ;  cf.  C  7).  But  Leskien,  Sievers,  and  since  them 
other  recent  writers,  hold  the  opposite  view  (see  quotations  and 
summaries  in  Oertel  204  f.,  Wechssler  L  88  f.),  and  their  view  has 


2C2  CAUSES   OF  CHANGE  [cii.  xiv 

prevailed  to  the  extent  that  Siitterlin  (WW  33)  characterizes 
the  old  view  as  "empty  talk,"  "a  wrong  scent,"  and  "worthless 
subterfuges  now  rejected  by  our  science." 

Such  strong  words  may,  however,  be  out  of  place,  for  is  it  so  very 
foolish  to  think  that  men  in  this,  as  in  all  other  respects,  tend  to 
follow  '  the  line  of  least  resistance  '  and  to  get  off  with  as  little 
exertion  as  possible  ?  The  question  is  only  whether  this  universal 
tendency  can  be  shown  to  prevail  in  those  phonetic  changes  which 
are  dealt  with  in  linguistic  history. 

Sutterlin  thinks  it  enough  to  mention  some  sound  changes  in 
which  the  new  sound  is  more  difficult  than  the  old  ;  these  being 
admitted,  he  concludes  (and  others  have  said  the  same  thing) 
that  those  other  instances  in  which  the  new  sound  is  evidently 
easier  than  the  old  one  cannot  be  explained  by  the  principle  of  ease. 
But  it  seems  clear  that  this  conclusion  is  not  valid  :  the  correct 
inference  can  only  be  that  the  tendency  towards  ease  may  be 
at  work  in  some  cases,  though  not  in  all,  because  there  are  other 
forces  which  may  at  times  neutralize  it  or  prove  stronger  than 
it.  We  shall  meet  a  similar  all-or-nothing  fallacy  in  the  chapter 
on  Sound  Sj^mbolism. 

Now,  it  is  sometimes  said  that  natives  do  not  feel  any  difficulty 
in  the  sounds  of  their  own  language,  however  difficult  these  may 
be  to  foreigners.  This  is  quite  true  if  we  speak  of  a  conscious 
perception  of  this  or  that  sound  being  difficult  to  produce  ;  but 
it  is  no  less  true  that  the  act  of  speaking  always  requires  some 
exertion,  muscular  as  well  as  psychical,  on  the  part  of  the  speaker, 
and  that  he  is  therefore  apt  on  many  occasions  to  speak  with 
as  little  effort  as  possible,  often  with  the  result  that  his  voice  is 
not  loud  enough,  or  that  his  words  become  indistinct  if  he  does 
not  move  his  tongue,  lips,  etc.,  with  the  required  precision  or 
force.  You  maj^  as  well  say  that  when  once  one  has  learnt  the  art 
of  writing,  it  is  no  longer  any  effort  to  form  one's  letters  properlj'  ; 
and  yet  how  many  written  commimications  do  we  not  receive 
in  which  many  of  the  letters  are  formed  so  badly  that  we  can 
do  little  but  guess  from  the  context  what  each  form  is  meant  for  ! 
There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  main  direction  of  change  in  the 
development  of  our  written  alphabet  has  been  towards  forms 
requiring  less  and  less  exertion — and  similar  causes  have  led  to 
analogous  results  in  the  development  of  spoken  sounds. 

It  is  not  alwa3'S  easy  to  decide  which  of  two  articulations  is 
the  easier  one,  and  opinions  may  in  some  instances  differ — we  may 
also  find  in  two  neighbouring  nations  opjjosite  phonetic  develop- 
ments, each  of  which  may  perhaps  be  asserted  by  speakers  of  the 
language  to  be  in  the  direction  of  greater  ease.  "  To  judge  of 
the  difficulty  of  muscular  activity,  the  muscular  quantity  at  play 


§6]  THE   EASE   THEORY  2G8 

cannot  serve  as  an  absolute  measure.  Is  [cl]  absolutely  more^ 
awkward  to  produce  than  [5]  ?  When  a  man  is  running  full  tilt, 
it  is  under  certain  circumstances  easier  for  him  to  rush  against 
the  wall  than  to  stop  suddenly  at  some  distance  from  it  :  when 
the  tongue  is  in  motion,  it  may  be  easier  for  it  to  thrust  itself 
against  the  roof  of  the  mouth  or  the  teeth,  i.e.  to  form  a  stop  (a 
plosive),  than  to  halt  at  a  millimetre's  distance,  i.e.  to  form  a 
fricative  "  (Vcrner  78).  In  the  same  sense  I  wrote  in  1904  :  "  Many 
an  articulation  which  obviously  requires  greater  muscular  move- 
ments is  yet  easier  of  execution  than  another  in  which  the 
movement  is  less,  but  has  to  be  carried  out  with  greater  precision  : 
it  requires  less  effort  to  chip  wood  than  to  operate  for  cataract  " 
(PhG  181). 

In  other  cases,  however,  no  such  doubt  is  possible  :  [s],  [f]  or 
[x]  require  more  muscular  exertion  than  [h],  and  a  replacement 
of  one  of  them  by  [h]  therefore  necessarily  means  a  lessening  of 
effort.  Now,  I  am  firmly  convinced  that  whenever  a  phonologist 
finds  one  of  these  oral  fricatives  standing  regularly  in  one  language 
against  [h]  in  another,  he  will  at  once  take  the  former  sound  to 
be  the  original  and  [h]  to  be  the  derived  sound  :  an  indisputable 
indication  that  the  instinctive  feeling  of  all  linguists  is  still  in 
favour  of  the  view  that  a  movement  towards  the  easier  sound 
is  the  rule,  and  not  the  exception. 

In  thus  taking  up  the  cudgels  for  the  ease  theory  I  am  not 
afraid  of  hearing  the  objection  that  I  ascribe  too  great  power 
to  human  laziness,  indolence,  inertia,  shirking,  easygoingness, 
sloth,  sluggishness,  lack  of  energy,  or  whatever  other  beautiful 
synonyms  have  been  invented  for  '  economy  of  effort  '  or 
'  following  the  line  of  least  resistance.'  The  fact  remains  that 
there  is  such  a  '  tendency  '  in  all  human  beings,  and  by  taking  it 
into  account  in  explaining  changes  of  sound  we  are  doing  nothing 
else  than  ajaplying  here  the  same  principle  that  attributes  many 
simplifications  of  form  to  '  analogy  '  :  we  see  the  same  psycho- 
logical force  at  work  in  the  two  different  domains  of  phonetics  and 
morphology. 

It  is,  of  course,  no  serious  objection  to  this  view  that  if  this 
had  been  always  the  direction  of  change,  speaking  must  have 
been  uncommonly  troublesome  to  our  earliest  ancestors  ^ — who 
says  it  wasn't  ? — or  that  "  if  certain  combinations  were  really 
irksome  in  themselves,  why  should  they  have  been  attempted 
at  all ;  why  should  they  often  have  been  maintained  so  long  ?  " 
(Oertel  204) — as  if  people  at  a  remote  age  had  been  able  to  compare 
consciousl}'^    two    articulations    and    to    choose    the    easier    one ! 

*  "  Dass  unsere  altesten  vorfahren  sich  das  sprechen  erstaunlich  unbequem 
gemacht  haben,"  Delbriick,  E  155. 


264  CAUSES   OF  CHANGE  [ch.  xiv 

Neither  in  language  nor  in  any  other  activity  has  mankind  at  once 
hit  upon  the  best  or  easiest  expedients. 

XIV.— §  7.  Sounds  in  Connected  Speech. 

In  the  great  majority  of  linguistic  changes  we  have  to  consider 
the  ease  or  difficulty,  not  of  the  isolated  sound,  but  of  the  sound 
in  that  particular  conjunction  with  other  sounds  in  which  it  occurs 
in  words. ^  Thus  in  the  numerous  phenomena  comprised  under 
the  name  of  assimilation.  There  is  an  interesting  account  in  the 
Proceedings  of  the  Philological  Society  (December  17,  1886)  of  a 
discussion  of  these  problems,  in  which  Sweet,  while  maintaining 
that  "  cases  of  saving  of  efiort  were  very  rare  or  non-existent  " 
and  that  "  all  the  ordinary  sounds  of  language  were  about  on  a 
par  as  to  difficulty  of  production,"  said  that  assimilation  "  sprang 
from  the  desire  to  save  space  in  articulation  and  secure  ease  of 
transition.  Thus  'pn  became  'pm,  or  else  ww."  But  in  both  these 
changes  there  is  saving  of  effort,  for  in  the  former  the  movement 
of  the  tip  of  the  tongue  required  for  [n],  and  in  the  latter  the  move- 
ment of  the  soft  palate  required  for  [p],  is  done  away  with  ^  ; 
the  term  "  saving  of  space  "  can  have  no  other  meaning  than 
economy  of  muscular  energy.  And  the  same  is  true  of  what 
Sweet  terms  "  saving  of  time,"  which  he  finds  efEected  by  dropping 
superfluous  soimds,  especially  at  the  end  of  words,  e.g.  [g]  after 
{rf\  in  E.  sing.  Here,  of  course,  one  articulation  (of  the  velum) 
is  saved — and  this  need  not  even  be  accompanied  by  the  saving 
of  any  time,  for  in  such  cases  the  remaining  soimd  is  often  lengthened 
so  as  to  make  up  for  the  loss.* 

If,  then,  all  assimilations  are  to  be  counted  as  instances  of 
saving  of  effort,  it  is  worth  noting   that  a  great  many  phonetic 

^  Sometimes  appearances  may  be  deceptive  r  when  [nr,  mr]  become 
[ndr,  mbr],  it  looks  on  the  paper  as  if  something  had  been  added  and  as 
if  the  transition  therefore  militated  against  the  principle  of  ease  :  in  reality, 
the  old  and  the  new  combinations  require  exactly  the  same  amoimt  of 
muscular  activity,  and  the  change  simply  consists  in  want  of  precision  in 
the  movement  of  the  velum  palati,  which  comes  a  fraction  of  a  second  too 
Boon.  If  anything,  the  new  group  is  a  trifle  easier  than  the  old.  See  LPh 
6.  6  for  explanation  and  examples  (E.  thunder  from  }l>unor  sb.,}7M?2nan  vb.  ; 
timber,  cf.  Goth,  tlmrian,  G.  zimmer,  etc.). 

2  This  is  rendered  most  clear  by  my  '  analphabetic  '  notation  (a  means 
lips,  /^  tip  of  tongue,  c  soft  palate,  velum  palati,  and  €  glottis  ;  0  stands 
for  closed  position,  1  for  approximation,  3  for  open  position)  ;  the  three 
sound  combinations  are  thus  analysed  (cf.  my  Lekrbtich  der  Phonetik)  : 


3  0(0  03 

0  3      3  3     0 
3  0     3  3     3 

1  3      1  11 


'  The  only  clear  cases  of  saving  of  time  are  those  in  which  long  soxmds 
are  shortened,  and  even  they  must  be  looked  upon  as  a  saving  of  effort. 


§7]  SOUNDS    IN   CONNECTED   SPEECH  265 

changes  which  are  not  always  given  under  the  heading  of  assimila- 
tion should  really  be  looked  upon  as  such.  If  Lat.  saponem  yields 
Fr.  savon,  this  is  the  result  of  a  whole  series  of  assimilations  :  first 
[p]  becomes  [b],  because  the  vocal  vibrations  continue  from  the 
vowel  before  to  the  vowel  after  the  consonant,  the  opening  of 
the  glottis  being  thus  saved  ;  then  the  transition  of  [b]  to  [v] 
between  vowels  may  be  considered  a  partial  assimilation  to  the 
open  lip  position  of  the  vowels  ;  the  vowel  [o]  is  nasalized  in  conse- 
quence of  an  assimilation  to  the  nasal  [n]  (anticipation  of  the  low 
position  of  the  velum),  and  the  subsequent  dropping  of  the  conso- 
nant [n]  is  a  clear  case  of  a  different  kind  of  assimilation  (saving 
of  a  tip  movement)  ;  at  an  early  stage  the  two  final  sounds  of 
saponem  had  disappeared,  first  [m]  and  later  the  indistinct  vowel 
resulting  from  e  :  whether  we  reckon  these  disappearances  as 
assimilations  or  not,  at  any  rate  they  constitute  a  saving  of  effort. 
All  droppings  of  soimds,  whether  consonants  (as  t  in  E.  castle,  post- 
man, etc.)  or  vowels  (as  in  E.  p'rhaps,  business,  etc.),  are  to  be 
viewed  in  the  same  light,  and  thus  by  their  enormous  number  in 
the  history  of  all  languages  form  a  strong  argument  in  favour  of 
the  ease  theory. 

There  is  one  more  thing  to  be  considered  which  is  generally 
overlooked.  In  such  assimilations  as  It.  otto,  sette,  from  octo, 
septem,  a  greater  ease  is  effected  not  only  by  the  assimilation  as 
such,  by  which  one  of  the  consonants  is  dropped — for  that  would 
have  been  obtained  just  as  well  if  the  result  had  been  occo,  seppe — 
but  also  by  the  fact  that  it  is  the  tip  action  which  has  been  re- 
tained in  both  cases,  for  the  tip  of  the  tongue  is  much  more  flexible 
and  more  easily  moved  than  either  the  lips  or  the  back  of  the  tongue. 
On  the  whole,  many  soimd  changes  show  how  the  tip  is  favoured 
at  the  cost  of  other  organs,  thus  in  the  frequent  transition  of 
final  -m  to  -w,  found,  for  instance,  in  old  Gothonic,  in  Mddle 
English,  in  ancient  Greek,  in  Balto-Slavic,  in  Finnish  and  in 
Cliinese. 

In  the  discussion  referred  to  above  Sweet  was  seconded  by 
Lecky,  who  said  that  "  assimilations  vastly  multiplied  the  number 
of  elementary  sounds  in  a  language,  and  therefore  could  not  be 
described  as  facilitating  pronunciation."  This  is  a  great  exaggera- 
tion, for  in  the  vast  majoritj^  of  instances  assimilation  introduces 
no  new  sounds  at  all  (see,  for  instance,  the  lists  in  my  LPh  ch.  xi.). 
Lecky  was  probably  thinking  of  such  instances  as  when  [k,  g] 
before  front  vowels  become  [t/,  d,^]  or  similar  combinations,  or 
when  mutation  caused  by  [i]  changes  [u,  o]  into  [y,0],  which  sounds 
were  not  previously  found  in  the  language.  Here  we  might  perhaps 
say  that  those  individuals  who  for  the  sake  of  their  own  ease 
introduced  new  sounds   made   things   more  difficult  for  coming 


26C  CAUSES   OF   CHANGE  [cii.  xiv 

generations  (though  even  that  is  not  quite  certain),  and  the 
case  would  then  be  analogous  to  that  of  a  man  who  has  learnt 
a  foreign  ex])ression  for  a  new  idea  and  then  introduces  it  into 
his  own  language,  thus  burdening  his  countrymen  with  a  new 
word  instead  of  thinking  how  the  same  idea  might  have  been 
rendered  by  means  of  native  speech-material — in  both  cases  a 
momentary  alleviation  is  obtained  at  the  cost  of  a  permanent 
disadvantage,  but  neither  case  can  be  alleged  against  the  \'iew 
that  the  prevalent  tendency  among  human  beings  is  to  prefer 
the  easiest  and  shortest  cut. 


XIV. — §8.  Extreme  Weakenings. 

When  this  lazy  tendency  is  indulged  to  the  full,  the  result 
is  an  indistinct  protracted  vocal  murmur,  Avith  here  and  there 
possibly  one  or  other  sound  (most  often  an  s)  rising  to  the  surface  : 
think,  for  instance,  of  the  way  in  which  we  often  hear  grace  said, 
prayers  mumbled  and  other  similar  formulas  muttered  inarticulately, 
with  half-closed  lips  and  the  least  possible  movement  of  the  rest 
of  the  vocal  organs.  This  is  tolerated  more  or  less  in  cases  in 
which  the  utterance  is  hardly  meant  as  a  communication  to  any 
human  being  ;  otherwise  it  will  generally  be  met  with  a  request 
to  repeat  what  has  been  said,  the  social  curb  being  thus  applied 
to  the  easygoing  tendencies  of  the  individual.  Now,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  there  are  in  every  language  a  certain  number  of  Avord- 
forms  that  can  only  be  explained  by  this  very  laziness  in  pro- 
nouncing, which  in  extreme  cases  leads  to  complete  unintelligibility. 

Russian  sudar'  {gosudar'),  '  sir^'  is  colloquially  shortened  into  a 
mere  s,  which  may  in  subservient  speech  be  added  to  almost  any 
word  as  a  meaningless  enclitic.  And  curiously  enough  the  same 
sound  is  used  in  exactly  the  same  way  in  conversational  Spanish, 
as  buenos  for  bueno  '  good,'  only  here  it  is  a  Aveakening  of  senor 
(Hanssen,  ^Span.  gramm.  60)  :  thus  two  entirely  different  words, 
from  identical  psychological  motives,  yield  the  same  result  in 
two  distant  countries.  Fr.  monsieur,  instead  of  [m5sjoe'r],  a 
might  be  expected,  sounds  [mosjo]  and  extremely  frequently 
[msj0]  and  even  [psJ0],  with  a  transition  not  otherwise  found  in 
French.  Madame  before  a  name  is  very  often  shortened  into 
[mam] ;  in  English  the  same  word  becomes  a  single  sound  in 
yes'm.  The  weakening  of  mistress  into  miss  and  the  old-fashioned 
mus  for  master  also  belong  here,  as  do  It.  forms  for  signore,  signora  : 
gnor  si,  gnor  no,  gnora  si,  sor  Luigi,  la  sora  sposa,  and  S]).  usted 
'  you  '  for  vuestra  merced.  Formulas  of  greeting  and  of  politeness 
are  liable  to  similar  truncations,  e.g.  E.  hoir  d{e)  do,  Dan.  [gda'J  or 
even  [da']  for  goddag,  G.  [gmoin,  gmo]  for  guten  morgen,  [na"mt] 


§8]  EXTREME   WEAKENINGS  267 

for  guten  abend  ;  Fr.  s'il  vous  i)lait  often  becomes  [siuple,  splc], 
and  the  synonymous  Dan.  var  sa  god  is  shortened  into  vcersgo,  of 
which  often  only  [sgo']  remains.  In  Russian  poiwlar  speech  some 
small  words  are  frequently  inserted  as  a  vague  indication  that 
the  utterance  or  idea  belongs  to  some  one  else  :  griu,  grit,  grim, 
gril,  various  mutilated  forms  of  the  verb  govoriV  '  say,'  mol  from 
rnolviV  '  speak,'  de  from  dejati  (Boyer  et  Speranski,  Manuel  293  ff.)  ; 
cp.  the  obsolete  E.  co,  quo,  for  quoth.  In  all  the  Balkan  languages 
a  particle  vre  is  extensively  used,  which  Hatzidakis  has  explained 
from  the  vocative  of  OGr.  moros.  Modern  Gr.  tha  is  now  a  particle 
of  futurity,  but  originates  in  thend,  from  iliBei,  '  he  will '  +  na  from 
hina,  'that.'  These  examples  must  suffice  to  show  that  we  have 
here  to  do  with  a  universal  tendency  in  all  languages. 

XIV.— §  9.  The  Principle  ol  Value. 

To  explain  such  deviations  from  normal  phonetic  development 
some  scholars  have  assumed  that  a  word  or  form  in  frequent  use 
is  liable  to  suffer  exceptional  treatment.  Thus  Vilhelm  Thomsen, 
in  his  brilliant  paper  (1879)  on  the  Romanic  verb  andare,  andar, 
anar,  aller,  which  he  explains  convincingly  from  Lat.  ambulare, 
says  that  this  verb  "  belongs  to  a  group  of  words  which  in  all 
languages  stand  as  it  were  without  the  pale  of  the  laws,  that  is, 
words  which  from  their  frequent  employment  are  exposed  to 
far  more  violent  changes  than  other  words,  and  therefore  to  some 
extent  follow  paths  of  their  owti."  ^  Schuchardt  {Ueber  die  lautge- 
setze,  1885)  turned  upon  the  '  young  grammarians,'  Paul  among 
the  rest,  who  did  not  recognize  this  principle,  and  said  that  one 
word  (or  one  sound)  may  need  10,000  repetitions  in  order  to  be 
changed  into  another  one,  and  that  consequently  another  word, 
which  in  the  same  time  is  used  only  8,000  times,  must  be  behindhand 
in  its  phonetic  development.  Quite  apart  from  the  fact  that 
this  number  is  evidently  too  small  (for  a  moderately  loquacious 
woman  will  easily  pronounce  such  a  word  as  he  half  a  dozen  times 
as  often  as  these  figures  every  year),  it  is  obvious  that  the  reasoning 
must  be  Avrong,  for  were  frequency  the  only  decisive  factor,  G. 
morgen  would  have  been  treated  in  every  other  connexion  exactly 
as  it  is  in  guten  morgen,  and  that  is  just  what  has  not  happened. 
Frequency  of  repetition  would  in  itself  tend  to  render  the  habitude 
firmly  rooted,  thus  really  capable  of  resisting  change,  rather  than 
the  opposite  ;  and  instead  of  the  purely  mechanical  explanation 
from  the  number  of  times  a  word  is  repeated,  we  must  look  for 

1  In  the  reprint  in  Samlede  AJhandlinger,  ii.  417  (1920),  a  few  lines  are 
added  in  which  Thomsen  fully  accepts  the  explanation  which  I  gave  as  far 
back  as  1886. 


268  CAUSES   OF  CHANGE  [ch.  xiv 

a  more  psychological  explanation.  This  naturally  must  be  found 
in  the  ease  with  which  a  word  is  understood  in  the  given  connexion 
or  situation,  and  especially  in  its  worthlessness  for  the  purpose 
of  communication.  Worthlessness,  however,  is  not  the  moving 
power,  but  merely  the  reason  why  less  restraint  than  usual  is 
imposed  on  the  ever-present  inclination  of  speakers  to  minimize 
effort.  A  parallel  from  another,  though  cognate,  sphere  of  human 
activity  may  perhaps  bring  out  my  point  of  view  more  clearly. 
The  taking  off  of  one's  hat,  combined  with  a  low  bow,  served  from 
the  first  to  mark  a  more  or  less  servile  submissiveness  to  a  prince 
or  conqueror  ;  then  the  gesture  was  gradually'  weakened,  and  a 
slight  raising  of  the  hat  came  to  be  a  polite  greeting  even  between 
equals  ;  this  is  reduced  to  a  mere  touching  of  the  hat  or  cap, 
and  among  friends  the  slightest  movement  of  the  hand  in  the 
direction  of  the  hat  is  thought  a  sufficient  greeting.  When,  how- 
ever, it  is  important  to  indicate  deference,  the  full  ceremonial 
gesture  is  still  used  (though  not  to  the  same  extent  by  all  nations)  ; 
otherwise  no  value  is  attached  to  it,  and  the  inclination  to  spare 
oneself  all  unnecessary  exertion  has  caused  it  to  dAvindle  down 
to  the  slightest  muscular  action  possible. 

The  above  instances  of  the  truncation  of  everyday  formulas, 
etc.,  illustrate  the  length  to  which  the  ease  princif)le  can  be  carried 
when  a  word  has  little  significatory  value  and  the  intention  of 
the  speaker  can  therefore  be  vaguely,  but  sufficiently,  understood 
if  the  proper  sound  is  merely  suggested  or  hinted  at.  But  in  most 
words,  and  even  in  the  words  mentioned  above,  when  they  are  to 
bear  their  full  meaning,  the  pronunciation  cannot  be  slurred  to  the 
same  extent,  if  the  speaker  is  to  make  himself  understood.  It  is  con- 
sequently his  interest  to  pronoimce  more  carefully',  and  this  means 
greater  conservatism  and  slower  phonetic  development  on  the  whole. 

There  are  naturally  many  degrees  of  relative  value  or  worth- 
lessness, and  words  may  vary  accordingl3\  An  illustration  may 
be  taken  from  my  own  mother -tongue  :  the  two  words  rigtig  nok, 
literally  '  correct  enough,'  are  pronounced  ['recti  'nok]  or  ['regdi  'nok] 
when  keeping  their  full  signification,  but  ^^hen  they  are  reduced 
to  an  adverb  with  the  same  imjDort  as  the  weakened  English 
certainly  or  {it  is)  true  (that),  there  are  various  shortened  pronun- 
ciations in  frequent  use  :  ['rectnog,  'regdnog,  'regnog,  'renog,  'renog]. 
The  worthlessness  may  affect  a  whole  plirase,  a  word,  or  merely 
one  syllable  or  sound. 

XIV. — §  10.  Application  to  Case  System,  etc. 

Our  principle  is  important  in  many  domains  of  linguistic 
history.     If  it  is  asked  why  the  elaborate  Old  English  system  of 


§10]  APPLICATION    TO   CASE  SYSTEM  2G9 

cases  and  genders  has  gradually  disappeared,  an  answer  that  will 
meet  with  the  approval  of  most  linguists  of  the  ordinary  school  is 
(in  the  words  of  J.  A.  H.  Murray)  :  "  The  total  loss  of  grammatical 
gender  in  English,  and  the  almost  complete  disappearance  of  cases, 
are  purely  phonetic  phenomena  " — supplemented,  of  course,  by 
the  recognition  of  the  action  of  analogy,  to  which  is  due,  for  instance, 
the  levelling  of  the  nom.  and  dative  plural  OE.  stanos  and  slamim 
under  the  single  form  stones.  The  main  explanation  thus  is  the 
following  :  a  phonetic  law,  operating  without  regard  to  the  signi- 
fication, caused  the  OE.  unstressed  vowels  -a,  -e,  -u  to  become 
merged  in  an  obscure  -e  in  Middle  English  ;  as  these  endings  were 
very  often  distinctive  of  cases,  the  Old  English  cases  were  con- 
sequently lost.  Another  phonetic  law  was  operating  similarly 
by  causing  the  loss  of  final  -n,  which  also  played  an  important 
rdle  in  the  old  case  system.  And  in  this  way  phonetic  laws  and 
analogy  have  between  them  made  a  clean  sweep  of  it,  and  we  need 
look  nowhere  else  for  an  explanation  of  the  decaj^  of  the  old 
declensions. 

Here  I  beg  to  differ  :  a  '  phonetic  law  '  is  not  an  explanation, 
but  something  to  be  explained  ;  it  is  nothing  else  but  a  mere 
statement  of  facts,  a  formula  of  correspondence,  which  says  nothing 
about  the  cause  of  change,  and  we  are  therefore  justified  if  we 
try  to  dig  deeper  and  penetrate  to  the  real  psychology  of  speech. 
Now,  let  us  for  a  moment  suppose  that  each  of  the  terminations 
-a,  -e,  -u  bore  in  Old  English  its  own  distinctive  and  sharply 
defined  meaning,  which  was  necessary  to  the  right  understanding 
of  the  sentences  in  which  the  terminations  occurred  (something 
like  the  endings  found  in  artificial  languages  like  Ido).  Would 
there  in  that  case  be  any  probability  that  a  phonetic  law  tending 
to  their  levelling  could  ever  have  succeeded  in  establishing  itself  1 
Most  certainly  not ;  the  all -important  regard  for  intelligibility 
would  have  been  sure  to  counteract  any  inclination  towards  a  slurred 
pronunciation  of  the  endings.  Nor  would  there  have  been  any 
occasion  for  new  formations  by  analogy,  as  the  formations  were 
already  sufficiently  analogous.  But  such  a  regularity  was  very 
far  from  prevailing  in  Old  English,  as  will  be  particularly  clear 
from  the  tabulation  of  the  declensions  as  printed  in  my  Chapters 
on  English,  p.  10  ff. :  it  makes  the  whole  question  of  causality  appear 
in  a  much  clearer  light  than  would  be  possible  by  any  other 
arrangement  of  the  grammatical  facts  :  the  cause  of  the  decay 
of  the  Old  English  apparatus  of  declensions  lay  in  its  manifold 
incongruities.  The  same  termination  did  not  always  denote  the 
same  thing  :  -u  might  be  the  nom.  sg.  masc.  {sunu)  or  fem.  {duru), 
or  the  ace.  or  the  dat.,  or  the  nom.  or  ace.  pi.  neuter  {hofn) ;  -a 
might  be  the  nom.  sg.  masc.  (guma),  or  the  dat.  sg.  masc.  {stina), 


270  CAUSES   OF  CHANGE  [ch.  xiv 

or  the  gen.  sg.  fern,  (dura),  or  the  nom.  pi.  masc.  or  fem.,  or 
finally  the  gen.  pi.  ;  -an  might  be  the  ace.  or  dat.  or  gen.  sg.  or 
the  nom.  or  ace.  pi.,  etc.  If  we  look  at  it  from  the  point  of  view 
of  function,  we  get  the  same  picture  ;  the  nom.  pi.,  for  instance, 
might  be  denoted  by  the  endings  -as,  -an,  -a,  -e,  -u,  or  by  mutation 
without  ending,  or  by  the  unchanged  kernel  ;  the  dat.  sg.  by 
-e,  -an,  -re,  -um,  by  mutation,  or  the  unchanged  kernel.  The 
whole  is  one  jumble  of  inconsistency,  for  many  relations  plainly 
distinguished  from  each  other  in  one  class  of  words  were  but 
imperfectly,  if  at  all,  distinguishable  in  another  class.  Add  to 
this  that  the  names  used  above,  dative,  accusative,  etc.,  have 
no  clear  and  definite  meaning  in  the  case  of  Old  English,  any 
more  than  in  the  case  of  kindred  tongues  ;  sometimes  it  did  not 
matter  which  of  two  or  more  cases  the  speaker  chose  to  employ  : 
some  verbs  took  indifferently  now  one,  now  another  case,  and 
the  same  is  to  some  extent  true  with  regard  to  prepositions.  No 
wonder,  therefore,  that  speakers  would  often  hesitate  which  of 
two  vowels  to  use  in  the  ending,  and  would  tend  to  indulge  in  the 
universal  inclination  to  pronounce  weak  syllables  indistinctly 
and  thus  confuse  the  formerly  distinct  vowels  a,  i,  e,  u  into  the 
one  neutral  vowel  [a],  which  might  even  be  left  out  without 
detriment  to  the  clear  understanding  of  each  sentence. ^  The 
only  endings  that  were  capable  of  withstanding  this  general  rout 
were  the  two  in  s,  -as  for  the  plural  and  -es  for  the  gen.  sg.  ; 
here  the  consonant  was  in  itself  more  solid,  as  it  were,  than  the 
other  consonants  used  in  case  endings  (n,  m),  and,  which  is  more 
decisive,  each  of  these  terminations  was  confined  to  a  more 
sharply  limited  sphere  of  use  than  the  other  endings,  and  the 
functions  for  which  they  served,  that  of  the  plural  and  that  of 
the  genitive,  are  among  the  most  indispensable  ones  for  clearness 
of  thought.  Hence  we  see  that  these  endings  from  the  earliest 
period  of  the  English  language  tend  to  be  applied  to  other* 
classes  of  nouns  than  those  to  which  they  were  at  first  confined 
{-as  to  masc.  o  stems  .  .  .),  so  as  to  be  at  last  used  with  practically 
all  nouns. 

If  explanations  like  Murray's  of  the  simplification  of  the 
English  case  system  are  widely  accepted,  while  views  like  those 
attempted  here  will  strike  most  readers  of  linguistic  works  as 
unfamiliar,  the  reason  ma}^  partly  at  any  rate,  be  the  usual 
arrangement  of  historical  and  other  grammars.  Here  we  first 
have  chapters  on  phonology,  in  which  the  facts  are  tabulated, 

*  The  above  remarks  are  condensed  from  the  argiunent  in  ChE  38  ff. 
Note  also  what  is  said  below  (Ch.  XiX  §  13)  on  the  loss  of  Lat.  final  -s  in  the 
Romanic  languages  after  it  had  ceased  to  be  necessary  for  the  grammatical 
understanding  of  eentencea. 


§10]  APPLICATION   TO   CASE   SYSTEM  271 

each  vowel  being  dealt  with  separately,  no  matter  what  its  function 
is  in  the  flexional  system  ;  then,  after  all  the  sounds  have  been 
treated  in  this  way,  we  come  to  morphology  (accidence,  formenlehre), 
in  which  it  is  natural  to  take  the  phonological  facts  as  granted 
or  already  known  :  these  therefore  come  to  be  looked  upon  as 
primary  and  morphology  as  secondary,  and  no  attention  is 
paid  to  the  value  of  the  sounds  for  the  purposes  of  mutual  under- 
standing. 

But  ever3'day  observations  show  that  sounds  have  not  always 
the  same  value.  In  ordinary  conversation  one  may  frequently 
notice  how  a  proper  name  or  technical  term,  when  first  introduced, 
is  pronounced  with  particular  care,  while  no  such  pains  is  taken 
when  it  recurs  afterwards  :  the  stress  becomes  weaker,  the  un- 
stressed vowels  more  indistinct,  and  this  or  that  consonant  may 
be  dropped.  The  same  principle  is  shown  in  all  the  abbreviations 
of  proper  names  and  of  long  words  in  general  which  have  been 
treated  above  (Ch  IX  §  7)  :  here  the  speaker  has  felt  assured 
that  his  hearer  has  understood  what  or  who  he  is  talking  about, 
as  soon  as  he  has  pronounced  the  initial  syllable  or  syllables, 
and  therefore  does  not  take  the  trouble  to  pronounce  the  rest  of 
the  word.  It  has  often  been  pointed  out  (see,  e.g.,  Curtius  K  72) 
that  stem  or  root  syllables  are  generally  better  preserved  than 
the  rest  of  the  word  :  the  reason  can  only  be  that  they  have 
greater  importance  for  the  understanding  of  the  idea  as  a  whole 
than  other  syllables. ^  But  it  is  especially  when  we  come  to 
examine  stress  phenomena  that  we  discover  the  full  extent  of 
this  principle  of  value, 

XIV.— §  11.  Stress  Phenomena. 

vStress  is  generally  believed  to  be  de^iendent  exclusively  on 
the  force  with  which  the  air -current  is  expelled  from  the  lungs, 
hence  the  name  of  '  expiratory  accent ' ;  but  various  observa- 
tions and  considerations  have  led  me  to  give  another  definition 
(LPh  7.  32,  1913)  :  stress  is  energy,  intensive  muscular  activity  not 

^  Against  this  it  has  been  urged  that  Fr.  oncle  has  not  pi-eserved  the 
stem  syllable  of  Lat.  avunculus  particularly  well.  But  this  objection  is 
a  little  misleading.  It  is  quite  true  that  at  the  time  when  the  word  was 
first  framed  the  syllable  av-  contained  the  main  idea  and  -unculus  was  only 
added  to  impart  an  endearing  modification  to  that  idea  ('  dear  little  uncle  ')  ; 
but  after  some  time  the  semantic  relation  was  altered  ;  avus  itself  passed  out 
of  use,  while  avunculus  was  handed  down  from  generation  to  generation  as  a 
ready-made  whole,  in  which  the  ordinary  speaker  was  totally  unable  to 
suspect  that  av-  was  the  really  significative  stem.  He  consequenth'  treated 
it  exactly  as  any  other  polj'syllablo  of  the  same  structure,  and  avun- 
(phonetically  [awuj,  auu»j])  was  naturally  made  into  one  syllable.  Nothing, 
of  course,  can  be  protected  by  a  sense  of  its  significance  imless  it  is  still 
felt  as  significant.     That  hardly  needs  Baying. 


272  CAUSES  OF  CHANGE  [ch.  xiv 

of  one  organ,  but  of  all  the  speech  organs  at  once.  To  pronounce 
a  '  stressed  '  syllable  all  organs  are  exerted  to  the  utmost.  The 
muscles  of  the  lungs  are  strongly  innervated  ;  the  movements 
of  the  vocal  chords  are  stronger,  leading  on  the  one  hand  in 
voiced  sounds  to  a  greater  approximation  of  the  vocal  chords, 
with  less  air  escaping,  but  greater  am})litude  of  \'ibrations  and 
also  greater  risings  or  fallings  of  the  tone.  In  voiceless  sounds, 
on  the  other  hand,  the  vocal  chords  are  kept  at  greater  distance 
(than  in  unstressed  syllables)  and  accordingly  allow  more  air  to 
escape.  Tn  the  upper  organs  stress  is  charact(!rized  by  marked 
articulations  of  the  velum  palati,  of  the  tongue  and  of  the  lips. 
As  a  result  of  all  this,  stressed  syllables  are  loud,  i.e.  can  be  heard 
at  great  distance,  and  distinct,  i.e.  easy  to  perceive  in  all  their 
components.  Unstressed  syllables,  on  the  contrary,  are  pro- 
duced with  less  exertion  in  every  way  :  in  voiced  sounds  the 
distance  between  the  vocal  chords  is  greater,  which  leads  to  the 
peculiar  '  voice  of  miirmur  '  ;  but  in  voiceless  sounds  the  glottis 
is  not  opened  very  ^\^de.  In  the  upper  organs  we  see  corresponding 
slack  movements ;  thus  the  velum  does  not  shut  off  the  nasal  cavity 
very  closely,  and  the  tongue  tends  towards  a  neutral  position, 
in  which  it  moves  very  little  either  up  and  down  or  backwards 
and  forwards.  The  lips  also  are  moved  with  less  energy,  and  the 
final  result  is  dull  and  indistinct  sounds.  Noav,  all  this  is  of  the 
greatest  importance  in  the  historj'  of  languages. 

The  psychological  importance  of  various  elements  is  the  chief, 
though  not  the  only,  factor  that  determines  sentence  stress  (see,  for 
instance,  the  chapters  on  stress  in  my  LPh  xiv.  and  ]\IEG  v.).  Now, 
it  is  well  known  that  sentence  stress  plaj's  a  most  important  role  in 
the  historical  development  of  any  language  ;  it  has  determined 
not  onlj'  the  difference  in  vowel  between  [woz]  and  [wgz],  both 
written  \vas,  or  between  the  demonstrative  [(5aet]  and  the  relative 
[Sat],  both  written  that,  but  also  that  between  one  and  an  or  a, 
originally  the  same  word,  and  between  Fr.  moi  and  me,  toi  and  te 
— one  might  give  innumerable  other  instances.  Value  also  plays 
a  not  unimportant  role  in  determining  which  syllable  among 
several  in  long  words  is  stressed  most,  and  in  some  languages 
it  has  re\'olutionized  the  whole  stress  system.  This  happened  with 
old  Gothonic,  whence  in  modern  German,  Scandinavian,  and  in 
the  native  elements  of  English  we  have  the  prevalent  stressing  of 
the  root  syllable,  i.e.  of  that  syllable  which  has  the  greatest 
psychological  value,  as  in  ^wishes,  be-speak,  etc. 

Now,  it  is  generally  said  that  if  double  forms  arise  like  one  and 
an,  moi  and  me,  the  reason  is  that  the  sounds  were  found  under 
'  different  phonetic  conditions  '  and  therefore  developed  differently, 
exactly  as  the  difference  between  an  and  a  or  between  Fr.  Jol 


§11]  STRESS   PHENOMENA  278 

and  Joa  is  due  to  the  same  word  being  placed  in  one  instance  before 
a  word  beginning  \vith  a  vowel  and  in  the  otlier  before  a  consonant, 
that  is  to  say,  in  different  external  conditions.  But  it  won't  do 
to  identify  the  two  things  :  in  the  latter  case  wo  really  have  some- 
thing external  or  mechanical,  and  here  we  may  rightl}'  use 
the  expression  '  phonetic  condition,'  but  the  difference  between 
a  strongly  and  a  weakly  stressed  form  of  the  same  word  depends 
on  something  internal,  on  the  very  soul  of  the  word.  Stress  is 
not  what  the  usual  A\ay  of  marking  it  in  writing  and  printing  might 
lead  us  to  think — something  that  hangs  outside  or  above  the 
word — but  is  at  least  as  important  an  element  of  the  word  as 
the  '  speech  sounds  '  which  go  to  make  it  up.  Stress  alternation 
in  a  sentence  cannot  consequently  he  reckoned  a  '  phonetic 
condition  '  of  the  same  order  as  the  initial  sound  of  the  next  word. 
If  we  say  that  the  different  treatment  of  the  vowel  seen  in  one 
and  an  or  moi  and  me  is  occasioned  by  varying  degrees  of  stress, 
we  have  '  explained  '  the  secondary  sound  change  only,  but  not 
the  primary  change,  which  is  tliat  of  stress  itself,  and  that 
change  is  due  to  the  different  significance  of  the  word  under  varying 
circumstances,  i.e.  to  its  varying  value  for  the  pm-poses  of  the 
exchange  of  ideas.  Over  and  above  mechanical  principles  we 
have  here  and  elsewhere  psychological  principles,  which  no  one 
can  disregard  with  impunity. 

XIV.— §  12.  Non-phonetic  Changes. 

Considerations  of  ease  play  an  important  part  in  all  depart- 
ments of  language  development.  It  is  impossible  to  draw  a  sharp 
line  between  phonetic  and  sjoitactic  phenomena.  We  have  what 
might  be  termed  prosiopesis  when  the  speaker  begins,  or  thinks 
he  begins,  to  articulate,  but  produces  no  audible  sound  till  one 
or  two  syllables  after  the  beginning  of  what  he  intended  to  say. 
This  phonetically  is  '  aphesis,'  but  in  many  cases  leads  to  the 
omission  of  whole  words ;  this  may  become  a  regular  speech  habit, 
more  particularly  in  the  case  of  certain  set  phrases,  e.g.  (Good) 
morning  /  (Do  you)  see  ?  /  (Will)  that  do  ?  /  (I  shall)  see  you 
again  this  afternoon ;  Fr.  {na.)tiirellement  /  (Je  ne  me)  rappelle 
plus,  etc. 

On  the  other  hand,  we  have  aposiopesis  if  the  s^jeaker  does 
not  finish  his  sentence,  either  because  he  hesitates  which  word 
to  employ  or  because  he  notices  that  the  hearer  has  ahead}'  caught 
his  meaning.  Hence  such  syntactic  shortenings  as  at  Braum's 
(house,  or  shop,  or  whatever  it  may  be),  which  may  then  be 
extended  to  other  places  in  the  sentence  ;  the  grocer's  was  closed 
/  St.   PauVs  is   very  grand,   etc.      Similar  abbreviations  due   to 

18 


274  CAUSES   OF   CHANGE  [ch.  xiv 

the  natural  disinclination  to  use  more  circumstantial  expressions 
than  are  necessary  to  convey  one's  meaning  are  seen  when,  instead 
of  my  straw  hat,  one  says  simply  rny  straw,  if  it  is  clear  to  one's 
hearers  that  one  is  talking  of  a  hat ;  thus  clay  comes  to  be  used 
for  clay  pipe,  return  for  return  ticket  ('We'd  better  take  returns') 
the  Ilaymarket  for  the  Haymarket  Theatre,  etc.  Sometimes  these 
shortenings  become  so  common  as  to  be  scarcel}'  any  longer  felt 
as  such,  e.g.  rifle,  landau,  bugle,  for  rifle  gun,  landau  carriage,  bugle 
horn  (further  examples  MEG  ii.  8.  9).  In  Maupassant  {Bel  Ami 
81)  I  find  the  following  scrap  of  conversation  which  illustrates 
the  same  principle  in  another  domain  :  "  Voila  six  mois  que  je 
suis  employe  aux  bureaux  du  chemin  de  fer  du  Nord."  "  Mais 
comment  diable  n'as-tu  pas  trouve  mieux  qu'une  place  d' employe 
au  Nord  ?  "  i 

The  tendency  to  economzie  effort  also  manifests  itself  when 
the  general  ending  -er  is  used  instead  of  a  more  specific  expression  : 
sleeper  for  sleeping-car  ;  bedder  at  college  for  bedmaker ;  speecher, 
footer,  brekker  (Harrow)  for  S2)eech-day,  football,  breakfast,  etc. 
Thus  also  when  some  nomi  or  verb  of  a  vague  or  general  meaning 
is  used  because  one  will  not  take  the  trouble  to  tliink  of  the  exact 
expression  required,  very  often  thing  (sometimes  extended  thingum- 
bob, cf.  Dan.  tingest,  G.  dingsda),  Fr.  chose,  machin  (even  in  place 
of  a  personal  name) ;  further,  the  verb  do  or  fix  (this  especially 
in  America).  In  some  cases  this  tendency'  may  permanently 
affect  the  meaning  of  a  common  noun  which  has  to  serve  so 
often  instead  of  a  specific  name  that  at  last  it  acquires  a  special 
signification  ;  thus,  corii  in  England  =  '  wheat,'  in  Ireland  =  '  oats,' 
in  America  =  '  maize,'  deer,  orig.  '  animal,'  Fr.  herbe,  now  '  grass,' 
etc.  As  many  people,  either  from  ignorance  or  from  carelessness, 
are  far  from  being  precise  in  thought  and  expression — they  "  Mean 
not,  but  blunder  round  about  a  meaning  " — words  come  to  be 
applied  in  senses  unknouii  to  former  generations,  and  some  of 
these  senses  may  gradually  become  fixed  and  established.  In 
some  cases  the  final  result  of  such  want  of  precision  may  even  be 
beneficial  ;  thus  English  at  first  had  no  means  of  expressing 
futurity  in  verbs.  Then  it  became  more  and  more  customary 
to  say  '  he  will  come,'  which  at  first  meant  '  he  has  the  will 
to  come,'  to  express  his  future  coming  apart  from  his  volition 
— thus,  also,   '  it  will    rain,'  etc.     Similarly   '  I    shall    go,'  which 

*  Compare  also  the  results  of  the  same  principle  seen  in  writing.  In 
a  letter  a  proper  name  or  technical  term  when  first  introduced  is  probably 
written  in  full  and  very  distinctly,  while  afterwards  it  is  either  written 
carelessly  or  indicated  by  a  mere  initial.  Any  shorthand-writer  knows 
how  to  utilize  this  principle  systematically. 


§12]  NON-PHONETIC  CHANGES  275 

originally  meant  '  I  am  obliged  to  go,'  was  used  in  a  less 
accurate  way,  where  no  obligation  was  thought  of,  and  thus 
the  language  acquired  something  which  is  at  any  rate  a  make- 
shift for  a  future  tense  of  the  verb.  But  considerations  of  space 
prevent  me  from  diving  too  deeply  into  questions  of  semantic 
change. 


CHAPTER    XV 
CAUSES    OF    CHANGE— continued 

§  1.  Emotional  Exaggerations.  §  2.  Euphony.  §  3.  Organic  Influences. 
§  4.  Lapses  and  Blendinga.  §  5.  Latitude  of  Correctnees.  §  6.  Equi- 
distant and  Convergent  Changes.  §  7.  Homophones.  §  8.  Signifi- 
cative Sounds  preserved.  §  9.  Divergent  Changes  and  Analogy. 
§  10.  Extension  of  Sound  Laws.  §  11.  Spreading  of  Sound  Change. 
§  12.  Reaction.  §  13.  Sound  Laws  and  Etymological  Science.  §  14. 
Conclusion. 

XV. — §  1.  Emotional  Exaggerations. 

In  the  preceding  chapter  we  have  dwelt  at  gretit  length  on  those 
changes  which  tend  to  render  articulations  easier  and  more  con- 
venient. But,  inij^ortant  as  they  are,  these  are  not  the  only  changes 
that  speech  sounds  undergo  :  there  are  other  moods  than  that 
of  ordinary  listless  everyday  conversation,  and  they  may  lead  to 
modifications  of  pronunciation  which  are  different  from  and  may 
even  be  in  direct  opposition  to  those  mentioned  or  hinted  at  above. 
Thus,  anger  or  other  violent  emotions  may  cause  emphatic  utter- 
ance; in  which,  e.g.,  stops  may  be  much  more  strongly  aspirated 
than  they  are  in  usual  quiet  parlance  ;  even  French,  which  has 
normally  unaspirated  ('  sharp  ')  [t]  and  [k],  under  such  circum- 
stances ma}'-  aspirate  them  strongly — '  Mais  taisez-vcns  done  !  ' 
Military  commands  are  characterized  by  peculiar  emphasizings, 
even  in  some  cases  di.stortions  of  sounds  and  words.  Pomposity 
and  consequential  airs  are  manifested  in  the  treatment  of  speech 
sounds  as  well  as  in  other  gestui-es.  Irony,  scoffing,  banter, 
amiable  chaffing — each  different  mood  or  temper  leaves  its  traces 
on  enunciation.  Actors  and  orators  will  often  use  stronger  articu- 
lations than  are  strictly  necessary  to  avoid  those  misunderstand- 
ings or  that  unintelligibility  which  may  ensue  from  slipshod  or 
indistinct  pronunciation.^  In  short,  anyone  who  will  take  careful 
note  of  the  wa}'-  in  which  people  do  reallj^  talk  \^^ll  find  in  the  most 
everyday  conversation  as  well  as  on  more  solemn  occasions  the 
greatest  variety  of  such  modilBcations  and  deviations  from  what 
might  be  termed  '  normal  '  pronunciation  ;    these,  however,  pass 

*  "  His  pronunciation  of  some  words  is  so  distinct  that  an  idea  crossed 
m«  once  that  he  might  be  an  actor  "  (Shaw,  Caahcl  Byron'a  Profession,  60). 

976 


§1]  KMOTIONAL  EXAGGERATIONS  277 

unnoticed  under  ordinary  circumstances,  when  the  attention  is 
directed  exclusively  to  the  contents  and  general  purport  of  the 
spoken  words.  A  vowel  or  a  consonant  will  be  made  a  trifle 
shorter  or  longer  than  usual,  the  lips  will  open  a  little  too  much, 
an  [e]  will  approach  [ve]  or  [i],  the  off-glide  after  a  final  [t]  will 
sound  nearly  as  [s],  the  closure  of  a  [d]  will  be  made  so  loosely 
that  a  little  air  will  escape  and  the  somid  therefore  will  be  approxi- 
mately a  [6]  or  -h  weak  fricative  point  [r],  etc.  Most  of  these 
modifications  are  so  small  that  they  cannot  be  represented  by 
letters,  even  by  those  of  a  ver}'^  exact  phonetic  alphabet,  but  they 
exist  all  the  same,  and  are  by  no  means  insignificant  to  those  who 
want  to  understand  the  real  essence  of  speech  and  of  linguistic 
change,  for  life  is  built  up  of  such  minutiae.  The  great  majority 
of  such  alterations  are  of  coiu-se  made  quite  unconsciously,  but 
by  the  side  of  these  we  must  recognize  that  there  are  some 
individuals  who  more  or  less  consciously  affect  a  certain  mode  of 
enunciation,  either  from  artistic  motives,  because  they  think  it 
beautiful,  or  simply  to  '  show  off ' — and  sometimes  such  pro- 
nunciations may  set  the  fashion  and  be  widely  imitated 
(cf.  below,  p.  292). 

Tender  emotions  may  lead  to  certain  lengthenings  of  soimds. 
The  intensifying  effect  of  lengthening  was  noticed  by  A.  Gill, 
Milton's  teacher,  in  1621,  see  Jiriczek's  reprint,  p.  48  :  "  Atque  vt 
Hebraei,  ad  ampliorem  vocis  alicuius  significationem,  sj^llabas 
adaugent  [cf.  here  below,  Ch.  XX  §  9] ;  sic  nos  syllabarum  tempora  : 
vt,  gret  [the  diseresis  denotes  vowel-length]  magnus,  greet  ingens  ; 
moiistrus  prodigiosum,  monstrus  valde  prodigiosum,  moonstrus 
prodigiosum  adeo  vt  hominem  stupidet."  Cf.  also  the  lengthening 
in  the  exclamation  God ! ,  by  novelists  sometimes  \vritten  Gawd 
or  Gord.  But  it  is  cm-ious  that  the  same  emotional  lengthening 
will  sometimes  affect  a  consonant  (or  first  part  of  a  diphthong) 
in  a  position  in  which  otherwise  we  always  have  a  short  quantity  ; 
thus,  Danish  clergjinen,  when  speaking  with  unction,  will  lengthen 
the  [1]  of  glcede  'joy,'  wliich  is  ridiculed  b}'  comic  wTiters  through 
the  unphonetic  spelling  ge-lcede  ;  and  in  the  same  way  I  find  in 
Kapling  [Stalky  119)  :  "We'll  make  it  a  be-antiful  house,"  and  in 
0.  Henry  {Roads  of  Destiny  133)  :  "  A  regular  Paradise  Lost  for 
elegance  of  scenery  and  be-yooty  of  geography."  I  suppose  that 
the  spellings  ber-luddy  and  bee-luddy,  whicli  I  find  in  recent  novels, 
are  meant  to  indicate  the  pronunciation  [bl"-Adi],  thus  the  exact 
counterpart  of  the  Dani.sh  example.  An  unstressed  vowel  before 
the  stressed  syllable  is  similarly  lengthened  in  "  Dee-lightful 
couple  !  "  (Shaw,  Doctor's  Dilemma  41)  ;  American  girl  students 
will  often  say  ['dili/]  for  delicious. 


278  CAUSES   OF  CHANGE  [ch.  xv 

XV.— §  2.  Euphony. 

It  was  not  uiicomDion  in  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  cen- 
turies to  ascribe  phonetic  changes  to  a  desire  for  euphony,  a  view 
which  is  represented  in  Bopp's  earliest  works.  But  as  early  as 
1821  Bredsdorff  says  that  "  people  will  always  find  that  euphonious 
which  they  are  accustomed  to  hear  :  considerations  of  euphony 
consequently  will  not  cause  changes  in  a  language,  but  rather 
make  for  keeping  it  unchanged.  Those  changes  which  are  gener- 
ally supposed  to  be  based  on  euphony  are  due  chiefly  to  conveni- 
ence, in  some  instances  to  care  of  distinctness."  This  is  quite 
true,  but  scarcely  the  whole  truth.  Euphony  depends  not  only 
on  custom,  but  even  more  on  ease  of  articulation  and  on  ease  of 
perception  :  what  requires  intricate  or  difficult  movements  of 
the  organs  of  speech  will  always  be  felt  as  cacophonous,  and  so 
will  anything  that  is  indistinct  or  blurred.  But  nations,  as  well 
as  individuals,  have  an  artistic  feeling  for  these  things  in  different 
degrees,  and  that  may  influence  the  phonetic  character  of  a  lan- 
guage, though  joerhaps  chiefly  in  its  broad  features,  while  it  may 
be  difficult  to  point  out  anj'  particular  details  in  phonological 
history  which  have  been  thus  worked  upon.  There  can  be  no 
doubt  that  the  artistic  feeling  is  much  more  develoi^ed  in  the  French 
than  in  the  English  nation,  and  Ave  find  in  French  fewer  obscure 
vowels  and  more  clearly  articulated  consonants  than  in  English 
(cf.  also  my  remarks  on  French  accent,  GS  §  28). 

XV. — §  3.  Organic  Influences. 

Some  modifications  of  speech  sounds  are  due  to  the  fact  that 
the  organs  of  speech  are  used  for  other  purposes  than  that  of 
speaking.  We  all  know  the  effect  of  someone  trying  to  sjoeak 
with  his  mouth  full  of  food,  or  with  a  cigar  or  a  pipe  hanging 
between  his  lips  and  to  some  extent  impeding  their  action. 
Various  emotions  are  expressed  by  facial  movements  which  may 
interfere  with  the  production  of  ordinary  speech  sounds.  A  child 
that  is  crying  speaks  differently  from  one  that  is  smiling  or  laugh- 
ing. A  smile  requires  a  retraction  of  the  corners  of  the  mouth 
and  a  partial  opening  of  the  lips,  and  thus  impedes  the  formation 
of  that  lip-closure  which  is  an  essential  part  of  the  ordinary  [m]  ; 
hence  most  people  when  smiling  will  substitute  the  labiodental  m, 
which  to  the  ear  greatly  resembles  the  bilabial  [m].  A  smile  will 
also  often  modify  the  front-round  vowel  [y]  so  as  to  make  it 
approach  [i].  Sweet  may  be  right  in  supposing  that  "  the  habit 
of  speaking  with  a  constant  smile  or  grin  "  is  the  reason  for  tne 
Cockney  unrounding  of  the  vowel  in  [nau]  for  no.     Schuchardt 


§8]  ORGANIC   INFLUENCES  279 

(Zs.  f.  rom.  Phil.  5.  314)  says  that  in  Andalusian  quia  !  instead 
of  ai  !  the  lips,  under  the  influence  of  a  certain  emotion,  are  drawn 
scoitingly  aside.  Inversely,  the  rounding  in  Josu  !  instead  of  Jesu  I 
is  due  to  wonder  (ib. ) ;  and  exactly  in  the  same  way  we  have 
the  surprised  or  pitying  exclamation  jeses  !  from  Jesus  in  Danish, 
Compare  also  the  rounding  in  Dan.  and  G.  [n0-]  for  [ne-,  nc-]  [nej, 
nein).  Lundell  mentions  that  in  Swedish  a  caressing  lilla  van 
often  becomes  hjlla  von,  and  I  have  often  observed  the  same 
rounding  in  Dan.  min  lille  ven.  Schuchardt  also  mentions  an 
Italian  [/]  instead  of  [s]  under  the  influence  of  pain  or  anger  {mi 
duole  la  tefta  ;  ti  do  tino  fchiuffo)  ;  a  Danish  parallel  is  the  frequent 
[/luS'ar]  for  sludder  'nonsense.'  We  are  here  verging  on  the 
subject  of  the  symbolic  value  of  speech  sounds,  which  will  occupy 
us  in  a  later  chapter  (XX). 

Observe,  too,  how  people  will  pronounce  under  the  influence 
of  alcohol :  the  tongue  is  not  under  control  and  is  incapable  of 
acciu'ately  forming  the  closure  necessary  for  [t],  which  therefore 
becomes  [r],  and  the  thin  rill  necessary  for  [s],  which  therefore 
comes  to  resemble  [J] ;  there  is  also  a  general  tendency  to  run 
soimds  and  syllables  together. ^ 


XV. — §  4.  Lapses  and  Blendings. 

All  these  deviations  are  due  to  influences  from  what  is  outside 
the  sphere  of  language  as  such.  But  we  now  come  to  something 
of  the  greatest  importance  in  the  life  of  language,  the  fact,  namely, 
that  deviations  from  the  usual  or  normal  pronunciation  are  very 
often  due  to  causes  inside  the  language  itself,  either  by  lingering 
reminiscences  of  what  has  just  been  spoken  or  by  anticipation  of 
something  that  the  speaker  is  just  on  the  point  of  pronouncing. 
The  process  of  speech  is  a  very  complicated  one,  and  while  one 
thing  is  being  said,  the  mind  is  continually  active  in  preparing 
what  has  to  be  said  next,  arranging  the  ideas  and  fashioning  the 
linguistic  expression  in  all  its  details.  Each  word  is  a  succession 
of  sounds,  and  for  each  of  these  a  complicated  set  of  orders  has 
to  be  issued  from  the  brain  to  the  various  speech  organs.  Some- 
times these  get  mixed  up,  and  a  command  is  sent  down  to  one 
organ  a  moment  too  early  or  too  late.  The  inclination  to  make 
mistakes   naturally  increases   with   the   number   of   identical   or 

^  Dickena,  D.  Cop.  2.  149  neverbe^rer,  150  I'mafraid  you'renorwell  (ib. 
also  r  for  n  :  Amigoarawaysoo,  Goori  =  Good  night).  |  Our  Mut.  Fr.  602 
lerrers.  |  Thackeray,  Newc.  163  Whas  that  ?  |  Anstey,  Vice  V.  328  s7mpper, 
I  s/jpose,  wharriplease,  say  tharragain.  |  Meredith,  R.  Feverel  272  Nor  a 
bir  of  it.  I  Walpole,  Duch.  of  Wrex.  323-4  nonshensh,  Wash  the  matter  ?  | 
Galsworthy,  In  Chanc.  17  cnvsh,  un«Atood'm.  Cf.  also  Fija  van  Draat, 
Est  34.  363  ff. 


280  CAUSES   OF   CHANGE  [ch.  xv 

similar  sounds  in  close  proximity.  This  is  well  known  from  those 
*  jaw-breaking  *  tongue-tests  with  which  people  amuse  them- 
selves in  all  countries  and  of  which  I  need  give  only  one  typical 
specimen  : 

She  Bells  sea8hell8  on  tho  seashore  , 
The  shells  she  polls  are  seashells,  I'm  sure, 
For  if  she  sells  seashells  on  the  seashore, 
Then  I'm  sure  she  sells  seashore  shells. 

K  the  mind  is  occupied  with  one  sound  while  another  is  being 
pronounced,  and  thus  either  runs  in  advance  of  or  lags  behind 
what  should  be  its  immediat^i  business,  the  linguistic  result  may 
be  of  various  kinds.  The  simplest  case  of  influencing  is  assimila- 
tion of  two  contiguous  sounds,  which  we  have  already  considered 
from  a  different  point  of  view.  Next  we  have  assimilative  in- 
fluence on  a  sound  at  a  distance,  as  A\hen  we  lapse  into  she  shells 
instead  of  sea  shells  or  she  sells  ;  such  is  Fr.  chercher  for  older 
sercher  (whence  E.  search)  from  Lat.  circare,  Dan.  and  G.  vulgar 
ferfant  for  sergeant ;  a  curious  mixed  case  is  the  prommciation  of 
transition  as  [tr3en'si58n] :  the  normal  development  is  [troen'zi/an], 
but  the  voice-articulation  of  the  two  hissing  sounds  is  reversed 
(possibly  under  accessory  influence  from  the  numerous  words  in 
which  we  have  [traen.s]  with  [s],  and  from  words  ending  in  [ijon], 
such  as  vision,  division).  Further  examples  of  such  assimilation 
at  a  distance  or  consonant-harmonization  (malmsey  from  malvesie, 
etc.)  maj^  be  foimd  in  my  LPh  11.  7,  where  there  are  also  examples 
of  the  corresponding  harmonizings  of  vowels  :  Fr.  camarade.  It. 
uguale,  Braga/iza,  from  camerade,  eguale,  Brigantia,  etc.  In  Ugro- 
Finnic  and  Turkish  this  harmony  of  vowels  has  been  raised  to 
a  principle  pervading  the  whole  structure  of  the  language,  as 
seen,  e.g.,  most  clearly  in  the  varying  plural  endings  in  Yakut 
agalar,  asdldr,  ogolor,  dorolor,  '  fathers,  bears,  children,  muzzles.' 

What  escaj^es  at  the  ^vrong  place  and  causes  confusion  maj' 
be  a  part  of  the  same  word  or  of  a  following  word  •  as  examples 
of  the  latter  case  may  be  given  a  few  of  the  lapses  recorded  in 
Meringer  and  Maj^er's  Versprechen  und  Verlesen  (Stuttgart,  1895) : 
instead  of  saying  Lateinisches  lehmvort  Ikleringer  said  Laten- 
isches  .  .  .  and  then  corrected  himself  ;  paster  noster  instead  of 
pater  iwster ;  wenn  das  wesser  .  .  .  wetter  icieder  besser  ist.  This 
phenomenon  is  termed  in  Danish  at  bakke  snagvendt  (for  snakke 
bagvendt)  and  in  English  Spoonerism,  from  an  Oxford  don,  W.  A. 
Spooner,  about  whom  many  comic  lapses  are  related  ("  Don't 
you  ever  feel  a  half-warmed  fish "  instead  of  "  half-formed 
wish  "). 

The  simplest  and  most  frequently  occurring  cases  in  which 
the  order  for  a  sound  is  issued  too  early  or  too  late  are  those  trans- 


§4]  LAPSES   AND   BLENDINGS  381 

positions  of  two  sounds  which  the  linguists  term  '  metathcses.' 
They  occur  most  frequently  with  s  in  connexion  with  a  stop  (icasp, 
waps  ;  ask,  ax)  and  with  r  (chiefly,  perhaps  exclusively,  the  trilled 
form  of  the  sound)  and  a  vowel  {third,  OE.  yridda).  A  more  com- 
plicated instance  is  seen  in  Fr.  trisor  for  tisor,  thesaiinim.  If  the 
mind  does  not  realize  how  far  the  vocal  organs  have  got,  the  result 
may  be  the  skipping  of  some  sound  or  sounds  ;  this  is  particularly 
likely  to  happen  when  the  same  somid  has  to  be  repeated  at  some 
little  distance,  and  we  then  have  the  phenomenon  termed  '  hap- 
lology,'  as  in  eighteen,  OE.  eahtatiene,  and  in  the  frequent  pronun- 
ciation probly  for  probably,  Fr.  contrdle,  idolatrie  for  contrerole, 
idololutrie,  Lat.  stipendium  for  stlpipendium,  and  numerous  similar 
instances  in  every  language  (LPh  II.  9).  Sometimes  a  sound  may 
be  skipped  because  the  mind  is  confused  through  the  fact  that 
the  same  sound  has  to  be  pronounced  a  little  later  ;  thus  the  old 
Gothonic  word  for  '  bird  '  (G.  vogel,  OE.  fugol ;  E.  fowl  with  a 
modified  meaning)  is  derived  from  the  verb  fly,  OE.  fleogan,  and 
originally  had  some  form  like  *flyglo  (OE.  had  an  adj.  flugol) ;  in 
recent  times  flugelman  (G.  fliigelmann)  has  become  fugleman. 
It.  has  Federigo  for  Frederigo — thus  the  exactly  opposite  result  of 
what  has  been  brought  about  in  trisor  from  the  same  kind  of  mental 
confusion. 

When  words  are  often  repeated  in  succession,  sounds  from 
one  of  them  will  often  creep  into  another,  as  is  seen  very  often  in 
numerals  :  the  nasal  which  was  found  in  the  old  forms  for  7,  9 
and  10  and  is  still  seen  in  E.  seven,  nine,  ten,  has  no  place  in  the 
word  for  8,  and  accordingly  we  have  in  the  ordinal  ON.  sjaundi, 
dtti,  niundi,  tiundi,  but  already  in  ON.  we  find  dttandi  by  the  side 
of  dtii,  and  in  Dan.  the  present-day  forms  are  syvende,  ottende, 
niende,  tiende  ;  in  the  same  way  OFr.  had  sedme,  uidme,  noefme, 
disme  (which  have  all  now  disappeared  with  the  exception  of  dtme 
as  a  substantive).  In  the  names  of  the  months  we  had  the  same 
formation  of  a  series  in  OFr.  :  septembre,  octembre,  novembre,  decem- 
bre,  but  learned  influence  has  reinstated  octobre.  G.  elf  for  older 
eilf  owes  its  vowel  to  the  following  zwelf ;  and  as  now  the  latter 
has  given  way  to  zwolf  (the  vowel  being  rounded  in  consequence 
of  the  to)  many  dialects  count  zehn,  olf,  zivolf.  Similarly,  it  seems 
to  be  due  to  their  frequent  occurrence  in  close  contact  with  the 
verbal  forms  in  -no  that  the  Italian  plural  pronouns  egli,  elle  are 
extended  with  that  ending :  eglino  amano,  elleno  dicono.  Diez 
compares  the  curious  Bavarian  wo-st  bist,  dem-st  gehorst,  etc.,  in 
which  the  personal  ending  of  the  verb  is  transferred  to  some 
other  word  with  which  it  has  nothing  to  do  (on  this  phenomenon 
see  Herzog,  Streitfragen  d.  roman.  phil.  48,  Buergel  Goodwin, 
Umgangsspr.  in  Sildbayem  99). 


282  CAUSES  OF  CHANGE  [ch.  xv 

In  speaking,  the  mind  is  occupied  not  only  with  the  words 
one  is  already  pronouncing  or  knows  that  one  is  going  to 
pronounce,  but  also  with  the  ideas  which  one  has  to  ex- 
press but  for  which  one  has  not  yet  chosen  the  linguistic 
form.  In  many  cases  two  synonyms  will  rise  to  the  con- 
sciousness at  the  same  time,  and  the  hesitation  between  them 
will  often  result  in  a  compromise  which  contains  the  head 
of  one  and  the  tail  of  another  word.  It  is  evident  that  this 
process  of  blending  is  intimatelj'  related  to  those  we  have  just 
been  considering  ;  see  the  detailed  treatment  in  Ch.  XVI  §  6. 

Syntactical  blends  are  very  frequent.  Hesitation  between 
different  from  and  other  than  will  result  in  different  than  or  another 
from,  and  similarly  we  occasionally  find  another  to,  different  to, 
contrary  than,  contrary  from,  opposite  from,  anywhere  than.  After 
a  clause  introduced  by  hardly  or  scarcely  the  normal  conjunction 
is  when,  but  sometimes  we  find  than,  because  that  is  regular  after 
the  synonymous  nx)  sooner. 


XV. — §5.  Latitude  of  Correctness. 

It  is  a  natural  consequence  of  the  essence  of  human  speech 
and  the  way  in  which  it  is  transmitted  from  generation  to  genera- 
tion that  we  have  everywhere  to  recognize  a  certain  latitude  of 
correctness,  alike  in  the  significations  in  which  the  words  may 
be  used,  in  syntax  and  in  pronunciation.  The  nearer  a  speaker 
keeps  to  the  centre  of  what  is  established  or  usual,  the  easier  will 
it  be  to  understand  him.  If  he  is  '  eccentric  '  on  one  point  or 
another,  the  result  may  not  always  be  that  he  conveys  no  idea 
at  all,  or  that  he  is  misunderstood,  but  often  mereh''  that  he  is 
understood  with  some  little  difficulty,  or  that  liis  hearers  have  a 
momentary  feeling  of  something  odd  in  his  choice  of  words,  or 
expressions  or  pronunciation.  In  many  cases,  when  someone 
has  overstepped  the  boundaries  of  what  is  established,  his  hearers 
do  not  at  once  catch  his  meaning  and  have  to  gather  it  from  the 
whole  context  of  what  follows  :  not  unfrequently  the  meaning 
of  something  yovi  have  heard  as  an  incomprehensible  string  of 
syllables  will  suddenly  flash  upon  you  without  your  knowing  how 
it  has  happened.  Msunderstandings  are,  of  course,  most  liable 
to  occur  if  words  of  different  meaning,  which  in  themselves  would 
give  sense  in  the  same  collocation,  are  similar  in  sound  :  in  that 
case  a  trifling  alteration  of  one  sound,  which  in  other  words  would 
create  no  difficulty  at  all,  may  prove  pernicious.  Now,  what  is 
the  bearing  of  these  considerations  on  the  question  of  sound 
changes  ? 

The  latitude  of  correctness  is  very  far  from  being  the  same  in 


§5]  LATITUDE  OF  CORRECTNESS  288 

different  languages.  Some  sounds  in  each  language  move  within 
narrow  boundaries,  while  others  have  a  much  larger  field  assigned 
to  them  ;  each  language  is  punctilious  in  some,  but  not  in  all 
points.  Deviations  which  in  one  language  would  be  considered 
trifling,  in  another  would  be  intolerable  perversions.  In  German, 
for  instance,  a  wide  margin  is  allowed  for  the  (local  and  individual) 
pronunciation  of  the  diphthong  written  en  or  du  (in  evh,  trdume)  : 
it  may  begin  with  [o]  or  [oe]  or  even  [se,  a],  and  it  may  end  in  [i], 
or  the  corresponcUng  rounded  vowel  [y],  or  one  of  the  mid  front 
vowels,  rounded  or  not,  it  does  not  matter  much ;  the  diphthong 
is  recognized  or  acknowledged  in  many  shapes,  while  the  similar 
diphthong  in  English,  as  in  toy,  voice,  allows  a  far  less  range  of 
variation  (for  other  examples  see  LPh  16.  22). 

Now,  it  is  very  important  to  keep  in  mind  that  there  is  an  in- 
timate connexion  between  phonetic  latitude  and  the  significations 
of  words.  If  there  are  in  a  language  a  great  many  pairs  of  words 
which  are  identical  in  sound  except  for,  say,  the  difference  between 
[e*]  and  [i']  (or  between  long  and  short  [i],  or  between  voiced  [b] 
and  voiceless  [p],  or  between  a  high  and  a  Ioav  tone,  etc.),  then 
the  speakers  of  that  language  necessarily  will  make  that  distinction 
with  great  precision,  as  otherwise  too  many  misunderstandings 
would  result.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  no  mistakes  worth  speaking 
of  would  ensue,  there  is  not  the  same  inducement  to  be  careful. 
In  English,  and  to  a  somewhat  lesser  degree  in  French,  it  is  easy 
to  make  up  long  lists  of  pairs  of  words  where  the  sole  difference 
is  between  voice  and  voicelessness  in  the  final  consonant  {cab  cap, 
bad  bat,  frog  frock,  etc.)  ;  hence  final  [b]  and  [p],  [d]  and  [t],  [g] 
and  [k]  are  kept  apart  conscientiously,  while  German  possesses 
very  few  such  pairs  of  words ;  in  German,  consequently,  the 
natural  tendency  to  make  final  consonants  voiceless  has  not  been 
checked,  and  all  final  stopped  consonants  have  now  become  voice- 
less. In  initial  and  medial  position,  too,  there  are  very  few  ex- 
amples in  German  of  the  same  distinction  (see  the  lists,  LPh  6.  78), 
and  this  circumstance  makes  us  understand  why  Germans  are 
so  apt  to  efface  the  difference  between  [b,  d,  g]  and  [p,  t,  k].  On 
the  other  hand,  the  distinction  between  a  long  and  a  short  vowel  is 
kept  much  more  effectively  in  German  than  in  French,  because 
in  German  ten  or  twenty  times  as  many  words  would  be  liable  to 
confusion  through  pronouncing  a  long  instead  of  a  short  vowel 
or  vice  versa.  In  French  no  two  words  are  kept  apart  by  means 
of  stress,  as  in  English  or  Grcrman  ;  so  the  rule  laid  dowTi  in 
grammars  that  the  stress  falls  on  the  final  sj^Uable  of  the  word  is 
very  frequently  broken  through  for  rhythmic  and  other  reasons. 
Other  similar  instances  might  easily  be  advanced. 


284  CAUSES   OF   CHANGE  [ch.  xv 

XV. — §  6.  Equidistant  and  Convergent  Changes. 

Phonetic  shifta  are  of  two  kinds  :  the  sliifted  sound  may  be 
identical  with  one  already  found  in  the  language,  or  it  may  be  a 
new  sound.  In  the  former,  but  not  in  the  latter  kind,  fresh  possi- 
bilities of  confusions  and  misunderstandings  may  arise.  Now,  in 
some  cases  one  sound  (or  series  of  sounds)  marches  into  a  position 
wliich  has  just  been  abandoned  by  another  sound  (or  series  of 
sounds),  which  has  in  its  turn  shifted  into  some  other  place.  A 
notable  instance  is  the  old  Gothonic  consonant  shift :  Aiyan  6, 
d,  g  cannot  have  become  Gothonic  j),  t,  k  till  after  primitive  ^,  t,  k 
had  already  become  fricatives  [f,  ^p,  x  (h)],  for  had  the  shift  taken 
place  before,  intolerable  confusion  would  have  reigned  in  all  parts 
of  the  vocabulary.  Another  instructive  example  is  seen  in  the 
history  of  English  long  vowels.  Not  till  OE.  long  a  had  been 
rounded  into  something  like  [o*]  (OE.  stan,  ME.  stoon,  stone)  could 
a  new  long  a  develop,  chiefly  througii  lengthening  of  an  old  short 
a  in  certain  positions.  Somewhat  later  we  w  itness  the  great  vowel- 
raising  through  which  the  phonetic  value  of  the  long  vowels 
(written  all  the  time  in  essentially  the  same  way)  has  been  con- 
stantly on  the  move  and  yet  the  distance  between  them  has  been 
kept,  so  that  no  confusions  worth  speaking  of  have  ever  occurred. 
If  we  here  leave  out  of  account  the  rounded  back  vowels  and  speak 
only  of  front  vowels,  the  shift  may  be  thus  represented  through 
typical  examples  (the  first  and  the  last  columns  show  the  spelling, 
the  others  the  sounds)  : 

Middle  English. 


Klizabotban. 

Present  English. 

, -' ^ 

beit 

bait         bite 

bit 

bit          beet 

be-t 

bit          beat 

a'bae-t 

a' beit       abat 

(1)  bite  bi-ta 

(2)  bete  be-to 

(3)  bete  beta 

(4)  abate  a'ba'ta 

When  the  sound  of  (2)  was  raised  into  [i],  the  sound  of  (1) 
had  already  left  that  position  and  had  been  diphthongized,  and 
when  the  sound  of  (3)  was  raised  from  an  open  into  a  close  e,  (2) 
had  already  become  [i'] ;  (4)  could  not  become  (aj-]  or  [e]  till 
(3)  had  become  a  comparatively  close  e  sound.  The  four  vowels, 
as  it  were,  climbed  the  ladder  witliout  ever  reaching  each  other — 
a  climbing  which  took  centuries  and  in  each  case  implied  inter- 
mediate steps  not  indicated  in  our  survey.  No  clashings  could 
occur  so  long  as  each  category  kept  its  distance  from  the  sounds 
above  and  below,  and  thus  we  find  that  the  Elizabethans  as 
scrupulously  as  Chaucer  kept  the  four  classes  of  words  apart  in 
their  rimes.    But  in  the  seventeenth  centur}'  class  (3)  was  raised, 


§0]  EQUIDISTANT  AND  CONVERGENT  CHANGES  285 

and  as  no  corresponding  change  had  taken  place  with  (2),  the 
two  classes  have  now  fallen  together  with  the  single  sound  [i"]. 
This  entails  a  certain  number  of  homophones  such  as  had  not  been 
created  through  the  preceding  equidistant  changes. 


XV.— §7.  Homophones. 

The  reader  here  will  naturally  object  that  the  fact  of  new 
homophones  arising  through  this  vowel  change  goes  against  the 
theory  that  the  necessity  of  certain  distinctions  can  keep  in  check 
the  tendency  to  phonetic  changes.  But  homophones  do  not 
always  imply  frequent  misunderstandings  :  some  homophones 
are  more  harmless  than  others.  Now,  if  we  look  at  the  list  of  the 
homophones  created  b}^  this  raising  of  the  close  e  (MEG  i.  11.  74), 
we  shall  soon  discover  that  very  few  mistakes  of  any  consequence 
could  arise  through  the  obliteration  of  the  distinction  between 
this  vowel  and  the  previously  existing  [i*].  For  substantives  and 
verbal  forms  (like  bean  and  been,  beet  beat,  flea  flee,  heel  heal,  leek 
leak,  meat  meet,  reed  read,  sea  see,  seam  seem,  steel  steal),  or  sub- 
stantives and  adjectives  (like  deer  dear,  leaf  lief,  shear  sheer,  week 
weak)  will  generall}'  be  easily  distinguished  by  their  position  in 
the  sentence  ;  nor  will  a  plural  such  as  feet  be  often  mistaken  for 
the  singular  feat.  Actual  misunderstandings  of  any  importance 
are  only  imaginable  when  the  two  words  belong  to  the  same  '  part 
of  speech,'  but  of  such  pairs  we  meet  only  few  :  beach  beech,  breach 
breech,  mead  meed,  peace  puce,  peal  peel,  quean  queen,  seal  ceil, 
wean  ween,  wheal  wheel.  I  think  the  judicious  reader  will  agree 
with  me  that  confusions  due  to  these  words  being  pronounced 
in  the  same  way  Avill  be  few  and  far  between,  and  one  understands 
that  they  camiot  have  been  powerful  enough  to  prevent  hundreds 
of  other  words  from  having  their  sound  changed.  An  effective 
prevention  can  only  be  expected  when  the  falling  together  in 
sound  would  seriously  impair  the  understanding  of  many  sentences. 

It  is,  moreover,  interesting  to  note  how  many  of  the  words 
which  were  made  identical  with  others  through  this  change  were 
already  rare  at  the  time  or  have  at  any  rate  become  obsolete 
since  :  this  is  true  of  breech,  lief,  meed,  mete  (adj.),  quean,  weal, 
wheal,  ween  and  perhaps  a  few  others.  Now,  obsolescence  of  some 
words  is  always  found  in  connexion  with  such  convergent  sound 
changes.  In  some  cases  the  word  had  already  become  rare  before 
the  change  in  sound  took  place,  and  then  it  is  obvious  that  it  cannot 
have  offered  serious  resistance  to  the  change  that  was  setting  in. 
In  other  cases  the  dying  out  of  a  word  must  be  looked  upon  as 
a  consequence  of  the  sound  change  which  had  actually  taken  place. 
Many  scholars  are  now  inclined  to   see  in  phonetic  coalescence 


28G  CAUSES   OF   CHANGE  [ch.  xv 

one  of  the  chief  reasons  why  words  fall  into  disuse,  see,  e.g., 
Liebisch  (PBB  XXIII,  228,  many  German  examples  in  0.  Wcise, 
Unsere  Mutterspr.,  3d  ed.,  206)  and  Giilieron,  La  faillite  de  V ety- 
mologic phonitique  (Neuveville,  1919 — a  book  vihose  sensational 
title  is  hardly  justified  by  its  contents). 

The  drawbacks  of  homophones  ^  are  counteracted  in  various 
ways.  Very  often  a  synonym  steps  forward,  as  when  lad  or  boy 
is  used  in  nearly  all  English  dialects  to  supplant  son,  which  has 
become  identical  in  sound  with  sim  (cf.  above  p.  120,  a  childish 
instance).  Very  often  it  becomes  usual  to  avoid  mismiderstand- 
ings  through  some  addition,  as  when  we  say  the  sole  of  her  foot, 
because  her  sole  might  be  taken  to  mean  her  soul,  or  when  the 
IVench  say  un  di  a  coudre  or  un  di  a  jouer  (cf .  E.  minister  of  religion 
and  cabinet  minister,  the  right-hand  corner,  the  subject-matter, 
where  the  same  expedient  is  used  to  obviate  ambiguities  arisen 
from  other  causes).  Cliinese,  of  course,  is  the  classical  example 
of  a  language  abounding  in  homophones  caused  by  convergent 
sound  changes,  and  it  is  highly  interesting  to  study  the  various 
ways  in  which  that  language  has  remedied  the  resulting  draw- 
backs, see,  e.g.,  B.  Karlgren,  Ordet  och  pennan  i  Mittens  rike  (Stock- 
holm, 1918),  p.  49  ff.  But  on  the  whole  we  must  say  th'at  the  ways 
in  which  these  phonetic  inconveniences  are  counteracted  are  the 
same  as  those  in  which  speakers  react  against  misunderstandings 
arising  from  semantic  or  sjTitactic  causes :  as  soon  as  they  perceive 
that  their  meaning  is  not  apprehended  they  tiu-n  their  phrases  in 
a  different  way,  choosing  some  other  expression  for  their  thought, 
and  by  this  means  language  is  gradually  freed  from  ambiguity. 

*  The  inconveniences  arising  from  having  many  homophones  in  a  language 
are  eloquently  set  forth  by  Robert  Bridges,  On  English  Homophones  (S.P.L., 
Oxford,  1919) — but  I  would  not  subscribe  to  all  the  Laureate's  views,  least 
of  all  to  his  practical  suggestions  and  to  his  unjustifiable  attacks  on  some 
very  meritorious  English  phoneticians.  He  seems  also  to  exaggerate  the« 
dangers,  e.g.  of  the  two  words  know  and  no  having  the  same  soimd,  when 
he  says  (p.  22)  that  unless  a  vowel  like  that  in  law  be  restored  to  tPte  negative 
no,  "  I  should  judge  that  the  verb  to  know  is  doomed.  The  third  person 
singular  of  its  present  tense  is  nose,  and  its  past  tense  is  new,  and  the  whole 
inconvenience  is  too  radical  and  perpetual  to  be  received  all  over  the  world." 
But  surely  the  role  of  these  words  in  connected  speech  is  so  different,  and 
is  nearly  always  made  so  clear  by  the  context,  that  it  is  very  difficult  to 
imagine  real  sentences  in  which  there  would  be  any  serious  change  of  mis- 
taking know  for  no,  or  knows  for  nose,  or  knew  for  new.  I  repeat  :  it  is  not 
homophonj'^  as  such — the  phenomenon  shown  in  the  long  lists  lexicographers 
can  draw  up  of  words  of  the  same  sound — that  is  decisive,  but  the  chances 
of  mistakes  in  connected  speech.  It  has  been  disputed  whether  the  loss 
of  Gr.  humeis,  '  ye,'  was  due  to  its  identity  in  sound  with  hemeis,  '  we  '  ; 
Hatzidakis  says  that  the  new  formation  eseis  is  earlier  than  the  falling 
together  of  e  and  u  [y]  in  the  sound  [i].  But  according  to  Dieterich  and 
C.  D.  Buck  {Classical  Philology,  9.  90,  1914)  the  confusion  of  u  and  i  or  e 
dates  back  to  the  second  century.  Anyhow,  all  confusion  is  now  obviated, 
for  both  the  first  and  the  second  persons  pi.  have  new  forms  which  are 
unambiguous  :  emeia  and  eaeia  or  *ef«. 


§8]        SIGNIFICATIVE  SOUNDS   PRESERVED         287 

XV.— §  8.  Significative  Sounds  preserved. 

My  contention  that  the  signiticative  side  of  language  has  in 
so  far  exercised  an  influence  on  phonetic  development  that  the 
possibility  of  many  misunderstandings  may  effectually  check 
the  coalescence  of  two  hitherto  distinct  somids  should  not  be 
identified  with  one  of  the  tenets  of  the  older  school  (Curtius  in- 
cluded) against  which  the  '  young  grammarians  '  raised  an 
emphatic  protest,  namely,  that  a  tendency  to  preserve  signi- 
ficative sounds  and  syllables  might  produce  exceptions  to  the 
normal  com-se  of  phonetic  change.  Delbriick  and  his  friends  may 
be  right  in  much  of  what  they  said  against  Cm'tius — for  instance, 
when  he  explained  the  retention  of  i  in  some  Greek  optative  forms 
thi'ough  a  consciousness  of  the  original  meaning  of  this  suffix  ;  but 
their  denial  was  in  its  way  just  as  exaggerated  as  his  affirmation. 
It  cannot  justly  be  urged  against  the  influence  of  signification  that 
a  preservation  of  a  sound  on  that  account  would  only  be  imagin- 
able on  the  supposition  that  the  speaker  was  conscious  of  a 
threatened  sound  change  and  wanted  to  avoid  it.  One  need  not 
suppose  a  speaker  to  be  on  his  guard  against  a  '  sound  law '  : 
the  only  tiling  required  is  that  he  should  feel,  or  be  made  to  feel, 
that  he  is  not  understood  when  he  speaks  indistinctly ;  if  on  that 
account  he  has  to  repeat  his  words  he  will  natm-ally  be  careful 
to  pronomice  the  sound  he  has  skipped  or  slurred,  and  may  even 
be  tempted  to  exaggerate  it  a  little. 

There  do  not  seem  to  be  many  quite  unimpeachable  examples 
of  words  which  have  received  exceptional  phonetic  treatment  to 
obviate  misunderstandings  arising  from  homophony ;  other  explana- 
tions (analogy  from  other  forms  of  the  same  word,  etc.)  can  gener- 
ally be  alleged  more  or  less  plausibly.  But  this  does  seem  to  be 
the  easiest  explanation  of  the  fact  that  the  E.  preposition  on  has 
always  the  full  vowel  [o],  though  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten  it  is  weakly 
stressed  and  though  all  the  other  analogous  prepositions  {to,  for, 
of,  at)  in  the  corresponding  weak  positions  in  sentences  are  gener- 
ally pronounced  -with  the  '  neutral '  vowel  [a].  But  if  on  were 
similarly  pronomiced,  ambiguity  would  very  often  result  from  its 
phonetic  identity  -with  the  weak  forms  of  the  extremely  frequent 
little  words  an  (the  indefinite  article)  and  and  (possibly  also  in), 
not  to  mention  the  great  number  of  [anjs  in  words  like  drunken, 
shaken,  deepen,  etc.,  where  the  forms  without  -e?i  also  exist.  With 
the  preposition  upon  the  same  considerations  do  not  hold  good, 
hence  the  frequency  of  the  pronunciation  [apan]  in  weak  position. 
Considerations  of  clearness  have  also  led  to  the  disuse  of  the  for- 
merly frequent  form  o  (o')  which  was  the  '  natural  '  development 
of  each  of  the  two  prepositions  on  and  of.     The  form  written  a 


288  CAUSES   OF  CHANGE  [ch.  xv 

survives  only  in  some  fossilized  combinations  like  ashore ;  in 
several  others  it  has  now  disappeared  [set  the  clock  going,  formerly 
a-going,  etc.). 

Sometimes,  when  all  ordinary  words  are  affected  by  a  certain 
sound  change,  some  words  prove  refractory  because  in  their  case 
the  old  sound  is  found  to  be  more  expressive  than  the  new  one. 
When  the  long  E.  [i']  was  diphthongized  into  [ai],  the  words  pipe 
and  ivhine  ceased  to  be  good  echoisms,  but  some  dialects  have 
peep  '  complain,'  which  keeps  the  old  sound  of  the  former,  and 
the  Irish  say  wheen  (Joj'ce,  English  as  we  speak  it  in  Ireland,  103). 
In  squeeze  the  [i"]  sound  has  been  retained  as  more  expressive — 
the  earlier  form  was  squize;  and  the  same  is  the  case  with  some 
words  meaning  '  to  look  narrowly  '  :  peer,  peek,  keek,  earlier  pire, 
pike,  kike  (cf.  Dan.  pippe,  kikke,  kige,  G.  kieken).^  In  the  same 
way,  when  the  old  [a*]  was  changed  into  [c,  ei],  the  word  gape 
ceased  to  be  expressive  (as  it  is  still  in  Dan.  gabe),  but  in  popular 
speech  the  tendency  to  raise  the  vowel  was  resisted,  and  the  old 
somid  [ga"p]  persisted,  spelt  garp  as  a  London  form  in  1817  (Ellis, 
EEP  V.  228)  and  still  common  in  many  dialects  (see  gaup,  garp 
in  EDD);  Professor  Hempl  told  me  that  [gap]  was  also  a  common 
pronunciation  in  America.  In  the  chapter  on  Sound  S3'mbolism 
(XX)  we  shall  see  some  other  instances  of  exceptional  phonetic 
treatment  of  symbolic  words  (especially  tiny,  teeny,  little,  cuckoo). 


XV.— §  9.  Divergent  Changes  and  Analogy. 

Besides  equidistant  and  convergent  sound  changes  we  have 
divergent  changes,  through  which  sounds  at  one  time  identical 
have  separated  themselves  later.  This  is  a  mere  consequence  of 
the  fact  that  it  is  rare  for  a  sound  to  be  changed  equally  in  all 
positions  in  which  it  occurs.  On  the  contrary,  one  must  admit 
that  the  vast  majority  of  sound  changes  are  conditioned  by  some 
such  circumstance  as  influence  of  neighboiu-ing  soimds,  position 
as  initial,  medial  or  final  (often  with  subdivisions,  as  position 
between  vowels,  etc.),  place  in  a  strongly  or  weakly  stressed 
S3llable,  and  so  forth.  One  may  take  as  examples  some  familiar 
instances  from  French  :  Latin  c  (pronounced  [k]),  is  variously 
treated  before  o  {corpus>  corps),  a  {cane7n>  chien),  and  e  [centum 
>  cent)  ;    in  amicum>  ami  it  has   totally  disappeared.     Lat.   a 

^  The  NED  has  not  arrived  at  this  explanation;  it  says  :  '^ Peer  ia  not 
a  phonetic  development  of  pire,  and  cannot,  so  far  as  is  at  present  known, 
be  formally  identified  with  that  word  "  ;  "  the  verbs  keek,  peek,  and  peep 
are  app.  closely  allied  to  each  other.  Kike  and  pike,  na  earlier  forms  of 
keek  and  peek,  occur  in  Chaucer  ;  pepe,  peep  is  of  later  appearance.  .  .  . 
The  phonetic  relations  between  the  forms  pike,  peek,  jyeak,  are  as  yet  un- 
explained." 


§9]       DIVERGENT  CHANGES    AND  ANALOGY       289 

becomes  e  in  a  stressed  open  syllable  {natum>  ne),  except  before 
a  nasal  {aniat  >  aivie)  ;  but  after  c  we  have  a  different  treatment 
{cancm>  chien) ,  and  in  a  close  syllable  it  is  kept  {arborem 
>  arbre)  ;  in  weak  syllables  it  is  kept  initially  {amorem>  amour), 
but  becomes  [a]  (spelt  e)  finally  {bona>  bonne).  This  enumeration 
of  the  chief  rules  will  serve  to  show  the  far-reaching  differentia- 
tion which  in  this  way  may  take  place  among  words  closely 
related  as  parts  of  the  same  paradigm  or  family  of  words  ; 
thus,  for  Lat.  atno,  amas,  amaf,  atnamus,  amatis,  amant  we  get 
OFr.  am,  aimes,  aime,  amons,  amez,  aiment,  until  the  discrepancy 
is  removed  through  analogy,  and  we  get  the  regular  modern 
forms  aime,  aimes,  aime,  aimoi^s,  aimez,  aiment.  The  levelling  ten- 
dency, however,  is  not  strong  enough  to  affect  the  initial  a  in 
amour  and  amant,  which  are  felt  as  less  closel}''  connected  with 
the  verbal  forms.  Wliat  were  at  first  only  small  differences  may 
in  com'se  of  time  become  greater  through  subsequent  changes,  as 
when  the  difference  between /eeZ  and  felt,  keep  and  kept,  etc.,  which 
was  originall}'  one  of  length  only,  became  one  of  vowel  quality 
as  well,  through  the  raising  of  long  [e"]  to  [i'],  while  short  [e]  was 
not  raised.  And  thus  in  many  other  cases.  Different  nations 
differ  greatly  in  the  degree  in  which  they  permit  differentiation  of 
cognate  words  ;  most  nations  resent  any  differentiation  in  initial 
sounds,  wliile  the  Kelts  have  no  objection  to  '  the  same  word  ' 
having  as  manj^  as  four  different  beginnings  (for  instance  t-,  d-, 
71-,  nil-)  according  to  circumstances.  In  Icelandic  the  word  for 
'  other,  second  '  has  for  centuries  in  different  cases  assumed 
such  different  forms  as  annarr,  onnur,  o'brum,  a^rir,  forms  which 
in  the  other  Scandinavian  languages  have  been  levelled  down. 

It  is  a  natural  consequence  of  the  manner  in  which  phono- 
logy is  usually  investigated  and  represented  in  manuals  of  historical 
grammar — which  start  with  some  old  stage  and  follow  the  various 
changes  of  each  sound  in  later  stages — that  these  divergent  changes 
have  attracted  nearly  the  sole  attention  of  scholars  ;  this  has 
led  to  the  prevalent  idea  that  sound  laws  and  analogy  are  the  two 
opposed  principles  in  the  life  of  languages,  the  former  tending 
always  to  destroy  regularity  and  harmony,  and  the  latter  recon- 
structing what  would  without  it  be  chaos  and  confusion.^ 

*  See,  for  instance,  the  following  strong  expressions  :  "  Une  langue 
est  sans  cesse  rongee  et  menac^e  de  ruine  par  Taction  des  lois  phon^tiques, 
qui,  livr^es  k  elles-memes,  op6rei'aient  avec  une  rdgularit^  fatale  et  d^eagre- 
geraient  le  syat^me  grammatical.  .  .  .  Heureusement  I'analogie  (c'est  ainsi 
qu'on  d6signe  la  tendance  inconsciente  A  conserver  ou  reorder  ce  que  lea 
lois  phon6tiques  menacent  ou  d^truisent)  a  peu  k  peu  effac6  ces  differences  .  .  . 
il  s'agit  d'une  perp^tuelle  degradation  due  aux  changements  phon^tiques 
aveugles,  et  qui  est  toujours  ou  pr^venue  ou  r^par^e  par  une  reorganisation 
parallele  du  aysttme  "  (Bally,  LV  44  f.). 

19 


290  CAUSES   OF  CHANGE  [ch.  xv 

This  view,  however,  is  too  rigorous  and  does  not  take  into 
account  the  manysidedness  of  linguistic  life.  It  is  not  every 
irregularity  that  is  due  to  the  operation  of  phonetic  laws,  as  we 
have  in  all  languages  many  survivals  of  the  confused  manner  in 
which  ideas  were  arranged  and  expressed  in  the  mind  of  primitive 
man.  On  the  other  hand,  there  are  many  phonetic  changes  which 
do  not  increase  the  number  of  existing  iiTcgularities,  but  make 
for  regularity  and  a  simpler  system  through  abolisliing  phonetic 
distinctions  which  had  no  semantic  or  functional  value  ;  .such 
are,  for  instance,  those  convergent  changes  of  unstressed  vowels 
which  have  simplified  the  English  flexional  system  (Ch.  XIV  §  10 
above).  And  if  we  were  in  the  habit  of  looking  at  linguistic  change 
from  the  other  end,  tracing  present  sounds  back  to  former  sounds 
instead  of  beginning  with  antiquitj',  we  should  see  that  convergent 
changes  are  just  as  frequent  as  divergent  ones.  Indeed,  many 
changes  may  be  counted  under  both  heads  ;  an  a,  which  is  dis- 
sociated from  other  a's  through  becoming  e,  is  identified  with 
and  from  henceforth  shares  the  destiny  of  other  e's,  etc. 


XV. — §  10.  Extension  of  Sound  Laws. 

If  a  phonetic  change  has  given  to  some  words  two  forms  without 
any  difference  in  signification,  the  same  alternation  may  be  ex- 
tended to  other  cases  in  which  the  sound  in  question  has  a  different 
origin  ('  phonetic  analog}'' ').  An  undoubted  instance  is  the  un- 
historic  r  in  recent  English.  When  the  consonantal  [r]  was 
di'opped  finally  and  before  a  consonant  while  it  was  retained  before 
a  vowel,  and  words  like  better,  here  thus  came  to  have  two  forms 
[beta,  hia]  and  [betar  (of),  liiar  (^n  6e'8)]  better  off,  here  and  there, 
the  same  alternation  Avas  transferred  to  words  like  idea,  drama 
[ai'dia,  dra-ma],  so  that  the  sound  [r]  is  now  ver}'  frequently  inserted 
before  a  word  beginning  with  a  vowel  :  Vd  iio  idea-r-of  this,  a 
drama-Y-of  Ibsen  (many  references  MEG  i.  13.  42).  In  French 
final  t  and  s  have  become  mute,  but  are  retained  before  a  vowel  : 
il  est  [e]  venu,  il  est  [et]  arrive  ;  les  [le]  femmes,  les  [lez]  hommes  ; 
and  now  vulgar  speakers  will  insert  [t]  or  [z]  in  the  wrong 
place  between  voAvels :  pa-t  assez,  fallai-t  ecrire,  avant-z-hier, 
moi-z-aiLSsi ;   this  is  called  '  cuir '  or  '  velours.' 

In  course  of  time  a  '  phonetic  law  '  maj*  undergo  a  kind  of 
metamorphosis,  being  extended  to  a  greater  and  greater  number 
of  combinations.  As  regards  recent  times  we  are  sometimes 
able  to  trace  such  a  gradual  development.  A  case  in  point  is 
the  dropping  of  [j]  in  [ju']  after  certain  consonants  in  English 
[see  MEG  i.  13,  7).  It  began  with  r  as  in  true,  rude  ;  next  came 
I  when  preceded  by  a  consonant,  as  in  bhie,  clue ;   in  these  cases 


§10]  EXTENSION   OF  SOUND   LAWS  291 

[j]  is  never  heard.  But  after  I  not  preceded  by  another  consonant 
there  is  a  good  deal  of  vacilhition,  thus  in  Luci/,  absolute  ;  after 
[s,  z]  as  in  Siisan,  resume  there  is  a  strong  tendency  to  suppress  [j], 
though  this  pronunciation  has  not  yet  prevailed,^  and  after  [t,  d,n], 
as  in  tune,  due,  new,  the  suppression  is  in  Britain  only  found  in  vulgar 
speakers,  while  in  some  parts  of  the  United  States  it  is  heard  from 
educated  speakers  as  well.  In  the  speech  of  the.se  the  sound  law 
may  be  said  to  attack  any  [ju-]  after  any  point  consonant,  while 
it  will  have  to  be  formulated  in  various  less  comprehensive  t^rms 
for  British  speakers  belonging  to  older  or  younger  generations. 
It  is  extremely  difficult,  not  to  say  impossible,  to  reconcile  such 
occurrences  with  the  orthodox  '  young  grammarian  '  theory  of 
sound  changes  being  due  to  a  sliifting  of  the  organic  feeling  or 
motor  sensation  (verschiebung  des  bewegungsgefiihls)  which  is 
supijosed  to  have  necessarily  taken  place  wherever  the  same  sound 
was  under  the  same  phonetic  conditions.  For  what  are  here  the 
same  phonetic  conditions  ?  The  position  after  r,  after  I  com- 
binations, after  I  even  when  standing  alone,  after  all  point  con- 
sonants ?  Each  generation  of  EngUsh  speakers  will  give  a 
different  answer  to  this  question.  Now,  it  is  highly  probable  that 
many  of  the  comprehensive  prehistoric  sound  changes,  of  which 
we  see  only  the  final  result,  while  possible  intermediate  stages 
evade  our  inquiry,  have  begun  in  the  same  modest  way  as  the 
transition  from  [ju]  to  [u]  in  English  :  with  regard  to  them  we 
are  in  exactly  the  same  position  as  a  man  who  had  heard  only 
such  speakers  as  say  consistently  [tru*,  ru'd,  blu",  lu'si,  su'zn, 
ri'zum,  tun,  du',  nu]  and  who  would  then  naturally  suppose 
that  [j]  in  the  combination  [ju*]  had  been  dropped  all  at  once 
after  any  point  consonant. 


XV.— §  11.  Spreading  of  Sound  Change. 

Sound  laws  (to  retain  provisionallj'^  that  firmly  established 
term)  have  by  some  linguists,  who  rightly  reject  the  comparison 
with  natural  laws  (e.g.  Meringer),  been  compared  rather  with  the 
'  laws  '  of  fashion  in  dress.  But  I  think  it  is  important  to  make 
a  distinction  here  :  the  comparison  with  fashions  throws  no  light 
whatever  on  the  question  how  sound  changes  originate — it  can  tell 
us  nothing  about  the  first  impulse  to  drop  [j]  in  certain  positions 
before  [u*] ;  but  the  compaiison  is  valid  when  we  come  to  consider 
the  question  how  such  a  change  when  first  begun  in  one  individual 
spreads  to  other  individuals.     While  the  former  question  has  been 

^  Some  speakers  will  say  [su']  in  Susan,  supreme,  superstition,  but  will 
take  care  to  pronounce  [sju*]  in  suit,  sue.  Others  are  more  consistent  one 
way  or  the  other. 


292  CAUSES   OF   CHANGE  [cii.  xv 

dealt  with  at  some  length  in  the  preceding  investigation,  it  now 
remains  for  us  to  say  something  about  the  latter.  The  spreading 
of  phonetic  change,  as  of  any  other  linguistic  change,  is  due  to 
imitation,  conscious  and  unconscious,  of  the  speech  habits  of 
other  people.  We  have  already  met  with  imitation  in  the  chapters 
dealing  with  the  child  and  with  the  influence  exerted  by  foreign 
languages.  But  man  is  apt  to  imitate  throughout  the  whole  of 
his  life,  and  this  statement  applies  to  his  language  as  much  as  to 
his  other  habits.  What  he  imitates,  in  tliis  as  in  other  fields,  is 
not  always  the  best ;  a  real  valuation  of  what  would  be  linguis- 
tically good  or  preferable  does  not  of  course  enter  the  head  of 
the  '  man  in  the  street.'  But  he  may  imitate  what  he  thinks 
pretty,  or  funny,  and  especially  what  he  thinks  characteristic  of 
those  people  whom  for  some  reason  or  other  he  looks  up  to. 
Imitation  is  essentially  a  social  phenomenon,  and  if  people  do  not 
always  imitate  the  best  (the  best  thing,  the  best  pronunciation), 
they  will  generalh^  imitate  '  their  betters,'  i.e.  those  that  are 
superior  to  them — in  rank,  in  social  position,  in  wealth,  in  every- 
thing that  is  thought  enviable.  What  constitutes  this  superiority 
cannot  be  stated  once  for  all  ;  it  varies  according  to  surroundings, 
age,  etc.  A  schoolboy  may  feel  tempted  to  imitate  a  rough,  swag- 
gering boy  a  year  or  two  older  than  himself  rather  than  his  teachers 
or  parents,  and  in  later  life  he  may  find  other  people  worthy  of 
imitation,  according  to  his  occupation  or  profession  or  individual 
taste.  But  when  he  does  imitate  he  is  apt  to  imitate  everything, 
even  sometimes  things  that  are  not  worth  imitating.  In  this  way 
Percy,  in  Henry  IV,  Second  Part,  ii.  3.  24 — 

was  indeed  the  glasse 
Wherein  the  noble  j'outh  did  dresse  themselues. 
He  had  no  legges,  that  practic'd  not  his  gate, 
And  speaking  thicke  ^  (which  Nature  made  hia  blemish) 
Became  the  accents  of  the  valiant. 
For  those  that  could  speake  low  and  tardily, 
Would  turne  their  owne  perfection  to  abusee, 
To  seeme  like  him.     So  that  in  speech,  in  gate  .  .  . 
He  was  the  marke,  and  glasse,  coppy,  and  booke. 
That  fashion'd  others. 

The  spreading  of  a  new  pronunciation  through  imitation  must 
necessarily  take  some  time,  though  the  process  may  in  some 
instances  be  fairly  rapid.  In  some  historical  instances  we  are 
able  to  see  how  a  new  sound,  taking  its  rise  in  some  particular  part 
of  a  country,  spreads  graduallj^  like  a  wave,  until  finally  it  has 
pervaded  the  whole  of  a  linguistic  area.  It  cannot  become  uni- 
versal all  at  once  ;   but  it  is  evident  that  the  more  natural  a  new 

*  I.e.  "  With  confused  and  indistinct  articulation  ;  also,  with  a  husky 
or  hoarse  voice  " — NED. 


§11]  SPREADING   OF  SOUND  CHANGE  298 

mode  of  pronunciation  seems  to  members  of  a  particular  speech 
community,  the  more  readily  will  it  be  accepted  and  the  more 
rapid  will  be  its  diffusion.  Very  often,  both  when  the  new  pro- 
nunciation is  easier  and  when  there  are  special  psychological 
inducements  operating  in  one  definite  direction,  the  new  form 
may  originate  independently  in  different  individuals,  and  that  of 
course  will  facilitate  its  acceptation  by  others.  But  as  a  rule  a 
new  pronunciation  does  not  become  general  except  after  manj' 
attempts  :  it  may  have  arisen  many  times  and  have  died  out 
again,  until  finall}'^  it  finds  a  fertile  soil  in  which  to  take  firm  root. 
It  may  not  be  superfluous  to  utter  a  warning  against  a  fallacy  which 
is  found  now  and  then  in  linguistic  works  :  when  some  Danish 
or  English  document,  say,  of  the  fifteenth  century  contains  a 
spelling  indicative  of  a  pronunciation  which  we  should  call 
'  modern,'  it  is  hastily  concluded  that  j^eople  in  those  days  spoke 
in  that  respect  exactly  as  they  do  now,  whatever  the  usual  spelling 
and  the  testimony  of  m.uch  later  grammarians  may  indicate  to 
the  contrarj'.  But  this  is  far  from  certain.  The  more  isolated 
such  a  spelling  is,  the  greater  is  the  probability  that  it  shows 
nothing  but  an  individual  or  even  momentary  deviation  from 
what  was  then  the  common  pronunciation — the  first  swallow  '  who 
found  Avith  horror  that  he'd  not  brought  spring.' 


XV.— §  12.  Reaction. 

Even  those  who  have  no  linguistic  training  will  have  some 
apperception  of  sounds  as  such,  and  will  notice  regular  correspon- 
dences, and  even  occasionally  exaggerate  them,  thereby  produc- 
ing those  '  hj'percorrect '  forms  which  are  of  specially  frequent 
occurrence  when  dialect  speakers  try  to  use  the  '  received  stan- 
dard '  of  their  country.  The  psychology  of  this  process  is  well 
brought  out  by  B.  I.  Wheeler,  who  relates  {Transact.  Am.  Philol. 
Ass.  32.  14,  1901  ;  I  change  his  symbols  into  my  own  phonetic 
notation)  :  "  In  my  o^m  native  dialect  I  pronounced  new  as  [nu*]. 
I  have  found  mj'self  in  later  years  inclined  to  say  [nju],  especially 
Avhen  speaking  carefulh^  and  particularly  in  public ;  so  also 
[tju'zdi]  Tuesday.  There  has  developed  itself  in  connexion  with 
these  and  other  words  a  dual  sound-image  [u*  :  ju"]  of  such  validity 
that  whenever  [u*]  is  to  be  formed  after  a  dental  [alveolar]  ex- 
plosive or  nasal,  the  alternative  [ju']  is  likely  to  present  itself  and 
create  the  effect  of  momentary  uncertainty.  Less  frequently  than 
in  new,  Tuesday,  the  [j]  intrudes  itself  in  tvne,  duty,  due,  dew,  tumour, 
tube,  tutor,  etc.  ;  but  under  special  provocation  I  am  liable  to  use 
it  in  any  of  these,  and  have  even  caught  myself,  when  in  a  mood 
of  uttermost  precision,  passing  beyond  the  bounds  of  the  imitative 


294  CAUSES   OF   CHANGE  [cii.  xv 

adoption  of  the  new  sound  into  self-annexed  territory,  and  creat- 
ing [dju']  do  and  [tjir]  two."  One  more  instance  from  America 
may  bo  given  :  "In  the  dialect  of  Missouri  and  the  neighbouring 
States,  final  a  in  such  words  as  America,  Arizona,  Nevada  becomes 
y — Americy,  Arizony,  Nevady.  All  educated  people  in  that  region 
carefully  correct  this  vulgarism  out  of  their  speech  ;  and  many 
of  them  carry  the  correction  too  far  and  say  Missoura,  jjraira,  etc." 
(Sturtevant,  LCH  79).  Similarly,  many  Ii-ish  people,  noticing 
that  refined  English  has  [i]  in  many  cases  where  they  have  [e*] 
{tea,  sea,  please,  etc.)  adopt  [i]  in  these  words,  and  tran.sfcr  it 
erroneously  to  words  like  great,  pear,  bear,  etc.  (MEG  i.  11.  73)  ; 
they  may  also,  when  correcting  their  own  ar  into  er,  in  such  words 
as  learn,  go  too  far  and  speak  of  derning  a  stocking  (Joyce,  English 
as  we  speak  it  in  Ireland,  93).  Cf.  from  England  such  forms  as 
ruing,  certing,  for  rni7i,  certain. 

From  Germany  I  may  mention  that  Low  German  speakers 
desiring  to  talk  High  German  are  apt  to  say  zeller  instead  of  teller, 
because  High  German  in  many  words  has  z  for  their  t  {zaJil,  zahm, 
etc.),  and  that  those  who  in  their  native  speech  have  j  for  g 
(Berlin,  etc.,  eine  jute  jebratene  jans  ist  eine  jute  jabe  jottes) 
will  sometimes,  when  trying  to  talk  correctly,  say  getzt,  gahr  for 
jetzt,  jahr.^ 

It  will  be  easily  seen  that  such  hypercorrect  forms  are  closely 
related  to  those  '  spelling  pronunciations  '  which  become  frequent 
M'hen  there  is  much  reading  of  a  language  whose  spelling  is  not 
accurately  phonetic  ;  the  nineteenth  century  saw  a  great  number 
of  them,  and  their  number  is  likelj''  to  increase  in  this  century — 
especially  among  social  upstarts,  who  are  always  fond  of  showing 
off  their  new-gained  superioritj'^  in  this  and  similar  wa3'^s.  But 
they  need  not  detain  us  here,  as  being  really  foreign  to  our  subject, 
the  natural  development  of  speech  sounds.  I  only  wish  to  point 
out  that  many  forms  which  are  apparently  due  to  influence  from' 
spelling  may  not  have  their  origin  exclusively  from  that  source, 
but  may  be  genuine  archaic  forms  that  have  been  preserved 
through  purely  oral  tradition  by  the  side  of  more  worn-down 
forms  of  the  same  word.  For  it  must  be  admitted  that  two  or 
three  forms  of  the  same  word  may  coexist  and  be  used  according 
to  the  more  or  less  solemn  style  of  utterance  employed.     Even 

^  Even  in  speaking  a  foreign  language  one  may  unconsciously  apply 
phonetic  correspondences  ;  a  countryman  of  mine  thus  told  me  that  he 
once,  in  his  anger  at  being  charged  an  exorbitant  price  for  something,  ex- 
claimed :  "  Das  sind  doch  unhlaue  preise  !  " — coining  in  the  hurrjr  the  word 
unblaue  for  the  Danish  ublu  (shameless),  because  the  negative  prefix  un- 
corresponds  to  Dan.  u-,  and  aw  very  often  stands  in  German  where  Dan. 
has  u  {haus  =  hus,  etc.).  On  hearing  his  own  words,  however,  he  imme- 
diately saw  his  mistake  and  burst  out  laughing 


§  12]  REACTION  295 

among  savages,  who  are  unacquainted  with  the  art  of  writing, 
we  are  told  that  archaic  forms  of  speech  are  often  kept  up  and 
remembered  as  parts  of  old  songs  only,  or  as  belonging  to  solemn 
rites,  cults,  etc. 


XV.— §  13.  Sound  Laws  and  Etymological  Science. 

In  this  and  the  preceding  chapter  I  have  tried  to  pass  in  review 
the  various  circumstances  which  make  for  changes  in  the  phonetic 
structure  of  languages.  My  treatment  is  far  from  exhaustive  and 
may  have  other  defects  ;  but  I  want  to  point  out  the  fact  that 
nowhere  have  I  found  any  reason  to  accept  the  theory  that  sound 
changes  always  take  place  according  to  rigorous  or  '  blind  '  laws 
admitting  no  exceptions.  On  the  contrary,  I  have  found  many 
indications  that  complete  consistency  is  no  more  to  be  expected 
from  human  beings  in  pronunciation  than  in  any  other  sphere. 

It  is  verj'  often  said  that  if  sound  laws  admitted  of  exceptions 
there  would  be  no  possibility  of  a  science  of  etymology.  Thus 
Curtius  wrote  as  early  as  1858  (as  quoted  by  Oertel  259)  :  "If 
the  history  of  language  really  showed  such  sporadic  aberrations, 
such  pathological,  wholly  irrational  phonetic  malformations,  we 
should  have  to  give  up  all  etymologizing.  For  only  that  which 
is  governed  by  law  and  reducible  to  a  coherent  system  can  form 
the  object  of  scientific  investigation  ;  whatever  is  due  to  chance 
may  at  best  be  guessed  at,  but  will  never  yield  to  scientific  infer- 
ence." In  his  practice,  however,  Curtius  was  not  so  strict  as  his 
followers.  Leskien,  one  of  the  recognized  leaders  of  the  '  young 
grammarians,'  says  {DekUnation,  xxvii)  :  "  If  exceptions  are 
admitted  at  will  (abweichungen),  it  amounts  to  declaring  that 
the  object  of  examination,  language,  is  inaccessible  to  scientific 
comprehension."  Since  then,  it  has  been  rejDeated  over  and  over 
again  that  without  strict  adherence  to  phonetic  laws  etymological 
science  is  a  sheer  impossibility,  and  sometimes  those  who  have 
doubted  the  existence  of  strict  laws  in  phonology  have  been  looked 
upon  as  obscurantists  adverse  to  a  scientific  treatment  of  lan- 
guage in  general,  although,  of  course,  they  did  not  believe  that 
everything  is  left  to  chance  or  that  they  were  free  to  put  forward 
purely  arbitrary  exceptions. 

There  are,  however,  many  instances  in  which  it  is  hardly 
possible  to  deny  etymological  connexion,  though  '  the  phonetic 
laws  are  not  observed,'  Is  not  Gothic  azgo  vnth  its  voiced  conso- 
nants evidently  '  the  same  word  '  as  E.  ash,  G.  asche,  Dan.  aske, 
with  their  voiceless  consonants  ?  G.  neffe  with  short  vowel  must 
nevertheless  be  identical  with  MHG.  neve,  OHG.  nevo ;  E.  pebble 
with  OE.  papol ;  rescue  with  ME.  rescoive  ;  fiagon  with  Fr.  fiacon, 


29G  CAUSES   OF   CHANGE  [en.  xv 

though  each  of  these  words  contains  deviations  from  what  wo 
find  in  other  cases.  It  is  hard  to  keep  apart  two  similar  forms 
for  '  heart,'  one  with  initial  gh  in  Skt.  hrd  and  Av.  zered-,  and 
another  with  initial  k  in  Gr.  kardia,  ker,  Lat.  cor,  Goth,  hairto, 
etc.  The  Greek  ordinals  Mbdomis,  dgdoos  have  voiced  consonants 
over  against  the  voiceless  combinations  in  hejUd,  okio,  and  yet 
cannot  be  separated  from  them.  All  this  goes  to  show  (and  many 
more  cases  might  be  instanced)  that  there  are  in  everj'^  language 
words  so  similar  in  sound  and  signification  that  thej'^  cannot  be 
separated,  though  they  break  the  '  sound  laws  '  :  in  such  cases, 
where  etjnnologies  are  too  palpable,  even  the  strictest  scholars 
momentarilj'  forget  their  strictness,  maybe  with  great  reluctance 
and  in  the  secret  hope  that  some  day  the  reason  for  the  deviation 
may  be  discovered  and  the  principle  thus  be  maintained. 

Instead  of  exacting  strict  adherence  to  sound  laws  everywhere 
as  the  basis  of  any  etymologizing,  it  seems  therefore  to  be  in  better 
agi'eement  with  common  sense  to  say  :  whenever  an  etymology 
is  not  palpably  e\ddent,  whenever  there  is  some  difficulty  because 
the  compared  words  are  cither  too  remote  in  sound  or  in  sense  or 
belong  to  distant  periods  of  the  same  language  or  to  remotely 
related  languages,  your  etymologj''  cannot  be  reckoned  as  j^^oved 
unless  you  have  shown  by  other  strictly  parallel  cases  that  the 
sound  in  question  has  been  treated  in  exactly  the  same  way  in  the 
same  language.  This,  of  course,  appUes  more  to  old  than  to  modern 
periods,  and  we  thus  see  that  while  in  living  languages  accessible 
to  direct  observation  we  do  not  find  sound  laws  observed  without 
exceptions,  and  though  we  must  suppose  that,  on  account  of  the 
essential  similarity  of  human  psj'^chology,  conditions  have  been 
the  same  at  all  periods,  it  is  not  imreasonable,  in  giving  etj-mo- 
logies  for  words  from  old  periods,  to  act  as  if  sound  changes  followed 
strict  laws  admitting  no  exceptions  ;  this  is  simplv  a  matter  of 
proof,  and  really  amounts  to  this  :  where  the  matter  is  doubt- 
ful, we  must  require  a  great  degree  of  j^robability  in  that  field 
which  allows  of  the  simplest  and  most  easilj^  controllable  formulas, 
nameh'  the  phonetic  field.  For  here  "\\e  have  comparatively 
definite  phenomena  and  are  consequent!}'  able  with  relative  ease 
to  compute  the  possibilities  of  change,  while  this  is  infinitely  more 
difficult  in  the  field  of  significations.  The  possibilities  of  semantic 
change  are  so  manifold  that  the  only  thing  generally  required 
when  the  change  is  not  obvious  is  to  show  some  kind  of  parallel 
change,  which  need  not  even  have  taken  place  in  the  same  lan- 
guage or  group  of  languages,  while  with  regard  to  somids  the 
corresponding  changes  must  have  occurred  in  the  same  language 
and  at  the  same  period  in  order  for  the  evidence  to  be  sufficient  to 
establish  the  etymology  in  question. 


§  18]  SOUND  LAWS  AND  ET\^IOLOGICAL  SCIENCE  297 

It  would  perhaps  be  best  if  linguists  entirely  gave  up  the  habit 
of  speaking  about  phonetic  '  laws,'  and  instead  used  some  such 
expression  as  phonetic  formulas  or  rules.  But  if  we  are  to  keep 
the  word  '  law,'  we  may  with  some  justice  think  of  the  use  of 
that  word  in  juridical  parlance.  Wlien  we  read  such  phrases  as  : 
tliis  assumption  is  against  phonetic  laws,  or,  phonetic  laws  do  not 
allow  us  this  or  that  etymology,  or,  the  wTiter  of  some  book  under 
review  is  guilty  of  many  transgressions  of  established  phonetic 
laws,  etc.,  such  expressions  cannot  help  suggesting  the  idea  that 
phonetic  laws  resemble  jjaragraphs  of  some  criminal  law.  We 
may  formulate  the  principle  in  something  like  the  following  way  : 
If  in  the  etjanologies  you  propose  you  do  not  observe  these  rules, 
if,  for  instance,  you  venture  to  make  Gr,  kaleo  =  E.  call  in  sjjite 
of  the  fact  that  Gr.  Jc  in  other  words  corresponds  to  E.  h,  then 
you  incur  the  severest  punishment  of  science,  your  etymology  is 
rejected,  and  you  yourself  are  put  outside  the  pale  of  serious 
students. 

In  another  respect  phonetic  laws  may  be  compared  with  what 
we  might  call  a  Darwinian  law  in  zoology,  such  as  this  :  the  fore- 
limbs  of  the  common  ancestor  of  mammals  have  developed  into 
flippers  in  whales  and  into  hands  in  apes  and  men.  The  simi- 
larity between  both  kinds  of  laws  is  not  inconsiderable.  A  micro- 
scopic examination  of  whales,  even  an  exact  investigation  by 
means  of  the  eye  alone,  will  reveal  innumerable  little  deviations  : 
no  two  flippers  are  exactly  alike.  And  in  the  same  ^^ay  no  two 
persons  speak  in  exactly  the  same  wa3^  But  the  fact  that  w'e 
cannot  in  detail  account  for  each  of  these  nuances  should  not 
make  us  doubt  that  they  are  developed  in  a  perfectlj^  natural 
wa,y,  in  accordance  with  the  great  law  of  causality,  nor  should  we 
despair  of  the  possibility  of  scientific  treatment,  even  if  some 
of  the  flippers  and  some  of  the  sounds  are  not  exactly  w'hat  we 
should  expect.  A  law  of  fore-limb  development  can  only  be 
deduced  through  such  observation  of  many  flippers  as  will  single 
out  what  is  tj'pical  of  whales'  flippers,  and  then  a  comparison 
with  the  typical  fore-limbs  of  their  ancestors  or  of  their  congeners 
among  existing  mammals.  And  in  the  same  way  we  do  not  find 
laws  of  phonetic  development  until,  after  leaving  what  can  be 
examined  as  it  were  microscopically,  we  go  on  telescopically  to 
examine  languages  which  are  far  removed  from  each  other  in 
space  or  time  :  then  small  differences  disappear,  and  we  discover 
nothing  but  the  great  lines  of  a  regular  evolution  which  is  the 
outcome  of  an  infinite  number  of  small  movements  in  many 
different  directions. 


298  CAUSES  OF  CHANGE  [en.  xv 

XV.— §14.  Conclusion. 

It  has  been  one  of  the  leading  thought.s  in  tlic  two  chapters 
devoted  to  the  causes  of  linguistic  change  that  phonetic  changes, 
to  be  fully  understood,  should  not  be  isolated  from  other  changes, 
foi'  in  actual  linguistic  life  we  witness  a  constant  interplay  of 
sound  and  sense.  Not  only  should  each  sound  change  be  always 
as  far  as  possible  seen  in  connexion  with  other  sound  changes 
going  on  in  the  same  period  in  the  same  language  (as  in  the  great 
vowel-raising  in  English),  but  the  effects  on  the  speech  material 
as  a  whole  should  in  each  case  be  investigated,  so  as  to  show  what 
homophones  (if  any)  were  produced,  and  what  danger  they 
entailed  to  the  understanding  of  natural  sentences.  Sounds 
should  never  be  isolated  from  the  words  in  which  the}^  occur,  nor 
M'ords  from  sentences.  No  hard-and-fast  boundary  can  be  drawn 
between  phonetic  and  non-phonetic  changes.  The  psychological 
motives  for  both  kinds  of  changes  are  the  same  in  many  cases, 
and  the  way  in  which  both  kinds  spread  through  imitation  is 
absolutely  identical  :  what  was  said  on  this  subject  above  (§11) 
applies  without  the  least  qualification  to  any  linguistic  change, 
whether  in  sounds,  in  grammatical  forms,  in  s\aitax,  in  the  signi- 
fication of  words,  or  in  the  adoption  of  ne^v  \^•o^ds  and  dropping 
of  old  ones. 

We  shall  here  finally  very  briefly  consider  something  which 
pla5''3  a  certain  part  in  the  development  of  language,  but  which 
has  not  been  adequately  dealt  with  in  what  precedes,  namely, 
the  desire  to  play  with  language.  We  have  already  met  with 
the  effects  of  playfulness  in  one  of  the  chapters  devoted  to  children 
(p.  148) :  here  we  shall  see  that  the  same  tendency  is  also  powerful 
in  the  language  of  grown-up  people,  though  most  among  young 
people.  There  is  a  certain  exuberance  which  will  not  rest  con- 
tented with  traditional  expressions,  but  finds  amusement  in  the 
creation  and  propagation  of  new  words  and  in  attaching  new 
meanings  to  old  words  :  this  is  the  exact  opposite  of  that  linguistic 
poverty  which  we  found  was  at  the  bottom  of  such  minimum 
languages  as  Pidgin-English.  We  find  it  in  the  wealth  of  pet- 
names  which  lovers  have  for  each  other  and  mothers  for  their 
children,  in  the  nicknames  of  schoolboys  and  of  '  pals  '  of  later 
life,  as  well  as  in  the  perversions  of  ordinarj'  words  which  at  times 
become  the  fashion  among  small  sets  of  people  who  are  constantly 
thrown  together  and  have  plenty  of  spare  time  ;  cf.  also  the  '  little 
language  '  of  kSwift  and  Stella.  Most  of  these  forms  of  speech 
have  a  narrow  range  and  have  only  an  ephemeral  existence,  but 
in  the  world  of  slang  the  same  tendencies  are  constantly  at  work. 

Slang  words  are  often  confused  with  vulgarisms,  though  the 


§14]  CONCLUSION  299 

two  things  arc  really  different.  The  vulgar  tongue  is  a  class 
dialect,  and  a  vulgarism  is  an  element  of  the  normal  speech  of 
low-class  people,  just  as  ordinarj?^  dialect  words  are  elements  of 
the  natural  speech  of  peasants  in  one  particular  district ;  slang 
words,  on  the  other  hand,  are  words  used  in  conscious  contrast 
to  the  natural  or  normal  speech :  they  can  be  found  in  all  classes 
of  society  in  certain  moods,  and  on  certain  occasions  when  a  speaker 
wants  to  avoid  the  natural  or  normal  word  because  he  thinks  it 
too  flat  or  uninteresting  and  wants  to  achieve  a  different  effect 
by  breaking  loose  from  the  ordinary  expression.  A  vulgarism  is 
what  will  present  itself  at  once  to  the  mind  of  a  person  belonging 
to  one  particular  class  ;  a  slang  word  is  something  that  is  wilfully 
substituted  for  the  first  word  that  will  present  itself.  The  dis- 
tinction will  perhaps  appear  most  clearly  in  the  case  of  grammar  : 
if  a  man  saj's  the^n  boys  instead  of  those  boys,  or  knowed  instead  of 
kneiv,  these  are  the  normal  forms  of  his  language,  and  he  knows 
no  better,  but  the  educated  man  looks  doMH  upon  these  forms 
as  vulgar.  Inverselj',  an  educated  man  may  amuse  himself  now 
and  then  by  using  forms  which  he  perfectly  well  knoA\s  are  not 
the  received  forms,  thus  vnmk  from  wink,  collode  from  collide, 
'pranght  from  preach  (on  the  analogy  of  taught)  ;  "  We  handshook 
and  ca^idlestuck,  as  somebody  said,  and  went  to  bed  "  (H.  James). 
But,  of  course,  slang  is  more  productive  in  the  lexical  than  in  the 
grammatical  portion  of  language.  And  there  is  something  that 
makes  it  difficult  in  practice  always  to  keep  slang  and  vulgar  speech 
apart,  namely,  that  when  a  person  wants  to  leave  the  beaten  path 
of  normal  language  he  is  not  alwa3'8  particular  as  to  the  source 
whence  he  takes  his  unusual  words,  and  he  may  therefore  some- 
times take  a  vulgar  word  and  raise  it  to  the  dignity  of  a  slang  word. 

A  slang  word  is  at  first  individual,  but  may  through  imitation 
become  fashionable  in  certain  sets  ;  after  some  time  it  may  either 
be  accepted  by  everybody  as  part  of  the  normal  language,  or  else, 
more  frequently,  be  so  hacknej'^ed  that  no  one  finds  pleasure  in 
using  it  any  longer. 

Slang  words  may  first  be  words  from  the  ordinary  language 
used  in  a  different  sense,  generally  metaphorically.  Sometimes 
we  meet  with  the  same  figurative  expression  in  the  slang  of  various 
countries,  as  when  the  '  head  '  is  termed  the  upper  story  {upper 
loft,  upperivorks)  in  English, >er^'er5/e  etage  in  Danish,  and  oberstiibchen 
in  German  ;  more  often  different  images  are  chosen  in  different 
languages,  as  when  for  the  same  idea  we  have  nut  or  chump  in 
English  and  pcere  ('  pear  ')  in  Danish,  coco  or  ciboule  (or  bovle)  in 
French.  Slang  words  of  this  character  may  in  some  instances  give 
rise  to  expressions  the  origin  of  which  is  totally  forgotten.  In  old 
alang  there  is  an  expression  for  the  tongue,  the  red  rag  ;  this  is 


800  CAUSES  OF  CHANGE  [ch.  xv 

shortened  into  the  rag,  and  I  suspect  that  the  verb  U>  rag,  '  to  scold, 
rate,  talk  severely  to  '  ("  of  obscure  origin,"  NED),  is  simply  from 
this  substantive  (of.  to  jaw). 

Secondly,  slang  words  may  be  words  of  the  normal  language 
used  in  their  ordinary  signification,  but  more  or  less  modified  in 
regard  to  form.  Thus  we  have  many  shortened  forms,  exam,  quad, 
pub,  for  examination,  quadrangle,  imhlic-hoiise,  etc.  Not  unfre- 
quently  the  shortening  process  is  combined  with  an  extension, 
some  ending  being  more  or  less  arbitrarily  substituted  for  the  latter 
part  of  the  word,  as  when  football  becomes  footer,  and  Rvgby  foot- 
ball and  Association  football  become  Rugger  and  Soaker,  or  when 
at  Cambridge  a  freshman  is  called  a  fresher  and  a  bedmaker  a 
bedder. 

In  schoolboys'  slang  (Harrow)  there  is  an  ending  -agger  which 
may  be  added  instead  of  the  latter  part  of  anj'  ^\■ord  ;  about  1885 
Prince  Albert  Victor  when  at  Cambridge  ^^•as  nicknamed  the  Prag- 
ger  ;  an  Agnostic  was  called  a  Nogger,  etc.  I  strongly  suspect  that 
the  word  swagger  is  formed  in  the  same  way  from  swashbncMer. 
Another  schoolboys'  ending  is  -g  :  fog,  seg,  lag,  for  '  first,  second, 
last,'  gag  at  Winchester  for  '  gathering  '  (a  special  kind  of  Latin 
exercise).  Charles  Lamb  mentions  from  Christ's  Hospital  crvg  for 
'  a  quarter  of  a  loaf,'  evidently  from  crust ;  sag  —  sovereign,  snag 
=  snail  (old),  sivig  =  swill  ;  words  \i\ie  fag,  -peg  away,  and  others  are 
perhajDS  to  be  explained  from  the  same  tendenc3\  Ai'nold  Bennett 
in  one  of  his  books  says  of  a  schoolboy  that  his  vocabulary  com- 
prised an  extraordinary  number  of  words  ending  in  gs  :  foggs, 
seggs,  for  first,  second,  etc.  It  is  interesting  to  note  that  in  French 
argot  there  are  similar  endings  added  to  more  or  less  mutilated 
words  :  -ague,  -eque,  -oque  (Sainean,  L' Argot  ancien,  1907,  50  and 
esi^ecially  57). 

There  is  also  a  peculiar  class  of  roundabout  expressions  iji 
which  the  speaker  avoids  the  regular  word,  but  hints  at  it  in  a 
covert  way  by  using  some  other  word,  generally  a  proper  name, 
which  bears  a  resemblance  to  it  or  is  derived  from  it,  reallj''  or 
seemingly.  Instead  of  saying  '  I  want  to  go  to  bed,'  he  will  say, 
'  I  am  for  Bedfordshire,'  or  in  German  '  leh  gehe  nach  Bethle- 
hem '  or  '  nach  Bettingen,'  in  Danish  '  g&  til  Slumstrup,  Sov- 
strup,  Hvilsted.'  Thus  also  'send  a  person  to  Birching-lane,' 
i.e.  to  whip  him,  '  he  has  been  at  Hammersmith,'  i.e.  has  been 
beaten,  thrashed;  'you  are  on  the  highway  to  Needham,'  i.e. 
on  the  high-road  to  povertv,  etc.  (Cf.  my  paper  on  "  Punning  or 
Allusive  Phrases  "  in  Nord.  Tidsslr.  f.  Fil.  3  r.  9.  66.) 

The  language  of  poetry  is  closely  related  to  slang,  in  so  far  as 
both  strive  to  avoid  commonplace  and  everydaj'  expressions. 
The  difference  is  that  where  slang  looks  only  for  the  striking  or 


§14]  CONCLUSION  801 

unexpected  expression,  and  therefore  often  is  merely  eccentric 
or  funny  (sometimes  only  would-be  comic),  poetry  looks  higher 
and  craves  abiding  beauty — beauty  in  thought  as  well  as 
beauty  in  form,  the  latter  obtained,  among  other  things,  by 
rhythm,  alliteration,  rime,  and  harmonious  variety  of  vowel 
sounds. 

In  some  coimtries  these  forms  tend  to  become  stereotyped, 
and  then  may  to  some  extent  kill  the  poetic  spirit,  poetry  becoming 
artificiality  instead  of  art ;  the  later  Skaldic  poetry  may  serve 
as  an  illustration.  Where  there  is  a  strong  literary  tradition — 
and  that  may  be  found  even  where  there  is  no  WTitten  literature — 
veneration  for  the  old  literature  handed  down  from  one's  ancestors 
will  often  lead  to  a  certain  fossilization  of  the  literary  language, 
which  becomes  a  shrine  of  archaic  expressions  that  no  one  uses 
naturally  or  can  master  without  great  labour.  If  this  state  of 
things  persists  for  centuries,  it  results  in  a  cleavage  between  the 
spoken  and  the  WTitten  language  which  cannot  but  have  the  most 
disastrous  effects  on  all  higher  education  :  the  conditions  pre- 
vailing nowadaj'-s  in  Greece  and  in  Southern  India  may  serve  as 
a  warning.  Space  forbids  me  more  than  a  bare  mention  of  this 
topic,  which  would  deserve  a  much  fuller  treatment ;  for  details 
I  may  refer  to  K.  Krumbacher,  Das  Problem  der  7ietigriechischen 
tSchriftspracke,  Munich,  1902  (for  the  other  side  of  the  case  see 
G.  N.  Hatzidakis,  Die  S2irachfrage  in  Oriechenland,  Athens,  1905) 
and  G.  V.  Ramamurti,  A  Memorandum  on  Modern  Telngn 
Madras,  1913. 


BOOK   IV 
THE   DEVELOPMENT    OF    LANGUAGE 


CHAPTER  XVI 
ETYMOLOGY 

§  1.  Achievements.  §2.  Doubtful  Cases.  §3.  Facts,  not  Fancies.  §4.  Hope. 
§  5.  Requirements.  §  6.  Blendings.  §  7.  Echo  Words.  §  8.  Some 
Conjunctions.     §  9.  Object  of  Etymology.     §  10.  Reconstruction. 

XVI. — §  1.  Achievements. 

Few  things  have  been  more  often  quoted  in  works  on  linguistics 
than  Voltaire's  mot  that  in  etymology  vowels  count  for  nothing 
and  consonants  for  very  little.  But  it  is  now  said  just  as  often 
that  the  satire  might  be  justlj'  levelled  at  the  pseudo-scientific 
etymologj^  of  the  eighteenth  centur}-,  but  has  no  application  to  our 
own  times,  in  which  etjanology  knows  how  to  deal  with  both 
vowels  and  consonants,  and — it  should  be  added,  though  it  is 
often  forgotten — with  the  meanings  of  words.  One  often  comes 
across  outbursts  of  joy  and  pride  in  the  achievements  of  modern 
etymological  science,  like  the  following,  which  is  quoted  here  instar 
omnium. :  "  Nowadays  etymology  has  got  past  the  period  of  more 
or  less  '  happy  thoughts  '  (giiicklichen  einfalle)  and  has  developed 
into  a  science  in  which,  exactly  as  in  any  other  science,  serious 
persevering  work  must  lead  to  reliable  results  "  (H.  Schroder, 
Ablautstuclien,  1910,  X;  cf.  above,  Max  Miiller  and  Whitney,  p.  89). 
There  is  no  denying  that  much  has  been  achieved,  but  it  is 
equally  true  that  a  skeptical  mind  cannot  fail  to  be  struck  with 
the  uncertainty  of  many  proposed  explanations :  very  often 
scholars  have  not  got  beyond  '  happy  thoughts,'  manj'^  of  which 
have  not  even  been  happy  enough  to  have  been  accepted  by 
anybod}'  except  their  first  ijerpetrators.  From  English  alone, 
which  for  twelve  hundred  years  has  had  an  abundant  written 
literature,  and  which  has  been  studied  by  manj^  eminent  linguists, 
who  have  had  many  sister-languages  with  Avhich  to  com- 
pare it,  it  would  be  an  easy  matter  to  compile  a  long  list  of 
words,  well-known  words  of  everyday  occurrence,  which  etymo- 
logists have  had  to  give  up  as  beyond  their  powers  of  solution 
(fit,  put,  pull,  cut,  rouse,  pun,  fun,  job).  And  equally  perplexing 
are  many  words  now  current  all  over  Europe,  some  of  them 
comparatively  recent  and  yet  completely  enigmatic  :  race,  baron, 
baroque,  rococo,  zinc. 

20  305 


806  ETY^IOLOGY  [ch.  xvi 

XVI.— §  2.  Doubtful  Cases. 

Or  let  us  take  a  word  of  that  class  which  forms  the  staple 
subject  of  etymological  disquisitions,  one  in  which  the  semantic 
side  is  literally  as  clear  as  simshine,  namely  the  word  for  '  sun.' 
Here  Ave  have,  among  others,  the  following  forms  :  (1)  sun,  OE. 
sunne,  Goth,  sunno;  (2)  Dan.,  Lat,  sol,  Goth,  sauil,  Gr,  helios ; 
(3)  OE.  sigel,  scegl,  Goth,  sugil ;  (4)  OSlav.  slutitce,  Russ.  solnce 
(now  with  mute  /).  That  these  forms  are  related  cannot  be 
doubted,  but  their  mutual  relation,  and  their  relation  to  Gr.  selene, 
which  means  'moon,'  and  to  OE.  sivegel  'sky,'  have  never  been 
cleared  up.  Holthausen  derives  sunno  from  the  verb  sinnan  '  go  ' 
and  OE.  sigel  from  the  verb  sigan  '  descend,  go  down  ' — but  is 
it  really  probable  that  our  ancestors  should  have  thought  of  the 
sun  primarily  as  the  one  that  goes,  or  that  sets  ?  The  word  south 
(orig.  *sun]> ;  the  n  as  in  OHG.  sund  is  still  kept  in  Dan.  senden) 
is  generally  explained  as  connected  with  sun,  and  the  meaning 
'  suimy  side  '  is  perfectly  natural ;  but  now  H.  Schroder  thinks 
that  it  is  derived  from  a  word  meaning  '  right  '  (OE.  sv)ii>re,  orig. 
'  stronger,'  a  comparative  of  the  adj.  found  in  G.  geschwind), 
and  he  says  that  the  south  is  to  the  right  when  you  look  at  the 
sun  at  sumise — Avhich  is  j)erfectly  true,  but  why  should  people 
have  thought  of  the  south  as  being  to  the  right  when  they  wanted 
to  speak  of  it  in  the  afternoon  or  evening  ? 

Let  me  take  one  more  example  to  show  that  om*  present  methods, 
or  perhaps  our  present  data,  sometimes  leave  us  completely  in  the 
Im'ch  with  regard  to  the  most  ordinaiy  words.  We  have  a  series 
of  words  which  may  all,  Avithout  any  formal  difficulties,  be  referred 
to  a  root-form  seqw-.     Their  significations  are,  respectively — 

(1)  'say,'  E,  say,  OE.  secgan,  ON.  segja,  G.  sagen,  Lith.  sahjti. 

To  this  is  referred  Gr.  ennepe,  enispein,  Lat.  inseque 
and  possibly  inquamS 

(2)  '  shoAv,  point  out,'  OSlav.  sociti,  Lat.  signum. 

(3)  '  see,'  E.  see,  OE.  seon,  Goth,  saihwan,  G.  sehen,  etc. 

(4)  '  folloAv,'    Lat.    sequor,    Gr.    hepomai,    Ski-,    sdcate.      Here 

belongs  Lat.  socius,  OE.  secg  'man,'  orig.  'foUoAver.' 
NoAA',  are  these  four  groups  '  etj-mologically  identical  '  ? 
Ophiions  differ  Avidely,  as  may  be  seen  from  C.  D.  Buck,  "  Words 
of  Speaking  and  Saying  "  {Am.  Journ.  of  Philol.  36.  128,  1915). 
They  may  be  thus  tabulated,  a  comma  meaning  supposed  identity 
and  a  dash  the  opposite  : 

1,  2-3,  4  Kluge,  Talk,  Torp. 
1,  2,  3-4  Brugmann. 
1,  2,  3,  4  Wood,  Buck.i 

'  With  regard  to  Lat.  signum  it  should  be  noted  that  it  is  by  others 
explained  as  coming  from  Lat.  secure  and  as  meaning  a  notch. 


§2]  DOUBTFUL   CASES  307 

For  the  transition  in  meaning  from  '  see  '  to  '  say  '  we  are 
referred  to  such  words  as  observe,  notice,  G.  bemerkung,  while  in 
G.  anweisen,  and  still  more  in  Lat.  dico,  there  is  a  similar  transition 
from  'show'  to  'say.'  Wood  derives  the  signification  'follow' 
from  'point  out,'  through  'show,  guide,  attend.'  With  regard 
to  the  relation  between  3  and  4,  it  has  often  been  said  that  to  see 
is  to  follow  with  the  eyes.  In  short,  it  is  possible,  if  you  take 
some  little  pains,  to  discover  notional  ties  between  all  four  groups 
which  may  not  be  so  very  much  looser  than  those  between  other 
words  which  everybody  thinks  related.  And  yet  ?  I  cannot  see 
that  the  knowledge  we  have  at  present  enables  us,  or  can  enable 
us,  to  do  more  than  leave  the  mutual  relation  of  these  groups  an 
open  question.  One  man's  guess  is  just  as  good  as  another's,  or 
one  man's  yes  as  another  man's  no — if  the  comiexion  of  these 
words  is  '  science,'  it  is,  if  I  may  borrow  an  expression  from  the 
old  archaeologist  Samuel  Pegge,  scientia  ad  libitum.  Personal 
predilection  and  individual  taste  have  not  been  ousted  from 
etymological  research  to  the  extent  many  scholars  would  have 
us  believe. 

Or  we  may  perhaps  say  that  among  the  etymologies  found  in 
dictionaries  and  linguistic  journals  some  are  solid  and  fii'm  as 
rocks,  but  others  are  liquid  and  fluctuate  like  the  sea  ;  and  finally 
not  a  few  are  in  a  gaseous  state  and  blow  here  and  there  as  the 
wind  listeth.  Some  of  them  are  no  better  than  poisonous  gases, 
from  which  may  Heaven  preserve  us  !  ^ 


XVI.— §  3.  Facts,  not  Fancies. 

As  early  as  1867  IMichel  Breal,  in  an  excellent  article  (reprinted 
in  M  267  ff.),  called  attention  to  the  dangers  resulting  from  the 
general  tendency  of  comparative  linguists  to  "  jump  intermediate 
steps  in  order  at  once  to  mount  to  the  earliest  stages  of  the  lan- 
guage," but  his  warning  has  not  taken  effect,  so  that  etjrmologists 
in  dealing  with  a  word  found  only  in  comparatively  recent  times 
will  often  try  to  reconstruct  what  might  have  been  its  Proto- 
Aryan  form  and  compare  that  with  some  word  found  in  some 
other  language.  Thus,  Falk  and  Torp  refer  G.  krieg  to  an  Aryan 
primitive  form  *greigho-,  *grtgho-,  which  is  compared   with  Irish 

^  It  is,  of  course,  impossible  to  say  how  great  a  proportion  of  the 
etymologies  given  in  dictionaries  should  strictly  be  classed  under  each  of 
the  following  heads  :  (1)  certain,  (2)  probable,  (3)  possible,  (4)  improbable, 
(5)  impossible — but  I  am  afraid  the  first  two  classes  would  be  the  least 
numerous.  Meillet  (Gr  59)  has  some  excellent  remarks  to  the  same  effect ; 
according  to  him,  "  pour  une  etymologie  sure,  les  dictionnaires  en  offrent 
plus  de  dix  qui  sont  douteuses  et  dont,  en  appliquant  une  m^thode  rigoureuse, 
on  ne  saurait  fair©  la  preuve." 


808  ETYMOLOGY  [ch.  xvi 

brig  'force.'  But  the  German  word  is  not  found  in  use  till  the 
middle  period  ;  it  is  peculiar  to  German  and  unknown  in  related 
languages  (for  the  Scandinavian  and  probably  also  the  Dutch 
words  are  later  loans  from  Germany).  These  writers  do  not  take 
into  account  how  improbable  it  is  that  such  a  word,  if  it  were 
really  an  old  traditional  word  for  this  fundamental  idea,  should 
never  once  have  been  recorded  in  any  of  the  old  documents  of  the 
whole  of  our  family  of  languages.  What  should  we  think  of  the 
man  who  would  refer  boche,  the  French  nickname  for  '  German  ' 
which  became  current  in  1914,  and  before  that  time  had  only  been 
used  for  a  few  years  and  known  to  a  few  people  onlj%  to  a  Proto- 
Aryan  root-form  ?  Yet  the  method  in  both  cases  is  identical ; 
it  presupposes  what  no  one  can  guarantee,  that  the  words  in 
question  are  of  those  which  trot  along  the  royal  road  of  language 
for  century  after  century  without  a  single  side-jump,  semantic 
or  phonetic.  Such  words  are  the  favourites  of  linguists  because 
they  have  always  behaved  themselves  since  the  days  of  Noah  ; 
but  others  are  full  of  the  most  unexpected  pranks,  which  no 
scientific  ingenuity  can  discover  if  we  do  not  happen  to  know  the 
historical  facts.  Think  of  grog,  for  example.  Admiral  Vernon, 
known  to  sailors  by  the  nickname  of  "  Old  Grog  "  because  he  wore 
a  cloak  of  grogram  (this,  by  the  way,  from  Fr.  gros  grain),  in  1740 
ordered  a  mixture  of  rum  and  water  to  be  served  out  instead 
of  pure  rum,  and  the  name  was  transferred  from  the  person 
to  the  drink.  If  it  be  objected  that  such  leaps  are  found 
only  in  slang,  the  answer  is  that  slang  words  very  often  become 
recognized  after  some  time,  and  who  knows  but  that  may 
have  been  the  case  with  krieg  just  as  well  as  with  many  a 
recent  word  ? 

At  any  rate,  facts  weigh  more  than  fancies,  and  whoever  wants 
to  establish  the  etj-mology  of  a  w'ord  must  first  ascertain  all  the 
historical  facts  available  with  regard  to  the  place  and  time  of 
its  rise,  its  earliest  signification  and  syntactic  construction,  its 
diffusion,  the  sjiionyms  it  has  ousted,  etc.  Thus,  and  thus  only, 
can  he  hope  to  rise  above  loose  conjectiu'es.  Here  the  great 
historical  dictionaries,  above  all  the  Oxford  New  English  Dictionary, 
render  invaluable  service.  And  let  me  mention  one  model  article 
outside  these  dictionaries,  in  which  Hermann  I\Ioller  has  in  my 
opinion  given  a  satisfactory  solution  of  the  riddle  of  G.  ganz  : 
he  explains  it  as  a  loan  from  Slav  komcl  '  end,'  used  especially 
adverbially  (perhaps  with  a  preposition  in  the  form  v-konec  or 
v-konc)  '  to  the  end,  completel.y  '  ;  Slav  c  =  G.  z,  Slav  k  pronounced 
essentially  as  South  G.  g ;  the  gradual  spreading  and  various 
significations  and  derived  forms  are  accounted  for  with  very  great 
learning  {Zs.  f.  D.  Alt.  36.  326  ff.).     It  is  curious  that  this  article 


§3]  FACTS,   NOT  FANCIES  809 

should  have  been  generally  overlooked  or  neglected,  though  the 
•vvTiter  seems  to  have  met  all  the  legitimate  requirements  of  a 
scientific  etymology. 


XVI.— §  4.  Hope. 

I  have  endeavoured  to  fulfil  these  requirements  in  the  new 
explanation  I  have  given  of  the  word  liope  (Dan.  hahe,  Swed. 
hoppas,  G.  hoffen),  now  used  in  all  Gothonic  tongues  in  exactly 
the  same  signification.  Etymologists  are  at  variance  about  this 
word.  Kluge  connects  it  with  the  OE.  noun  hyht,  and  from  that 
form  infers  that  Gothonic  *koj)6n  stands  for  *Jmq6n,  from  an  Arj'an 
root  kug  ;  he  sa3-s  that  a  connexion  with  Lat.  cupio  is  scarcely 
possible.  Walde  likewise  rejects  connexion  between  cupio  and 
either  Jiojye  or  Goth.  Imgjan.  To  Falk  and  Torp  hope  has  probably 
nothing  to  do  with  hylit,  but  probably  with  cupio,  which  is  derived 
from  a  root  *kup  =  kvap,  found  in  Lat.  vapor  '  steam,'  and  with 
a  secondary  form  *kiih,  in  hope,  and  "^kvab  in  Goth,  af-hwapjan 
'  choke  ' — a  wonderful  medlej'  of  significations.  H.  Moller 
{Indoeur.-Semit.  sammenlignende  Glossar  63),  in  accordance  with 
his  usual  method,  establishes  an  Aryo-Semitic  root  '*k-ii-,  meaning 
'  ardere  '  and  transferred  to  '  ardere  amore,  cupiditate,  desiderio,' 
the  root  being  extended  with  h- :  pi-  in  hope  and  cupio,  with  gh- 
in  Goth,  hugs,  and  with  g-  in  OE.  hyht.  Surely  a  typical  example 
of  the  perplexitj-  of  our  et3aiiologists,  who  disagree  in  everything 
except  just  in  the  one  thing  which  seems  to  me  extremely  doubtful, 
that  hope  with  the  present  spiritual  signification  goes  back  to 
common  Aryan.  Now,  what  are  the  real  facts  of  the  matter  ? 
Simply  these,  that  the  Vvord  hope  turns  up  at  a  comparatively 
late  date  in  historical  times  at  one  particular  spot,  and  from  there 
it  gradually  spreads  to  the  neighboming  countries.  In  Denmark 
{hah,  hdbe)  and  in  Sweden  [hopp,  hoppas)  it  is  first  found  late  in  the 
Middle  Ages  as  a  religious  loan  from  Low  German  hopie,  hopen. 
High  German  hoffen  is  found  very  rarely  about  1150,  but  does 
not  become  common  till  a  hundred  j-ears  later  ;  it  is  undoubtedly 
taken  (with  sound  substitution)  from  Low  German  and  moves 
in  Germany  from  north  to  south.  Old  Saxon  has  the  subst.  to-hopa, 
which  has  probably  come  from  OE.,  where  we  have  the  same 
form  for  the  subst.,  to-hopa.  This  is  pretty  common  in  religious 
prose,  but  in  poetry  it  is  found  only  once  (Boet.) — a  certain  indi- 
cation that  the  word  is  recent.  The  subst.  without  to  is  com- 
paratively late  (iElfric,  ab.  1000).  The  verb  is  found  in  rare 
instances  about  a  hundred  years  earlier,  but  does  not  become 
common  till  later.  Now,  it  is  important  to  notice  that  the  verb  in 
the  old  period  never  takes  a  direct  object,  but  is  always  comiected 


310  ETYMOLOGY  [ch.  xvi 

with  the  prciDosition  to  (compare  the  subst.),  even  in  modern 
usage  we  have  to  Jwpe  to,  for,  in.  Similarly  in  G. ,  w  here  the  phrase 
was  auj  elwas  hojfen  ;  later  the  verb  took  a  genitive,  then  a  pronoun 
in  the  accusative,  and  finally  an  ordinarj'  object  ;  in  biblical 
language  we  find  also  zu  gott  hojfen.  Now,  I  would  connect  our 
Avord  with  the  form  hopu,  found  twice  as  part  of  a  compoimd  in 
Beoivulf  (450  and  764),  where  '  refuge  '  gives  good  sense  :  hopan  to, 
then,  is  to  '  take  one's  refuge  to,'  and  to-hojia  '  refuge.'  This  verb 
I  take  to  be  at  first  identical  with  hop  (the  only  OE.  instance  I 
know  of  tliis  is  .^Ifric,  Horn.  1.  202  :  hoppode  ongean  his  drlhten). 
We  have  also  one  instance  of  a  verb  onhupian  (Cura  Past.  441) 
'  di-aw  back,  recoil,'  which  agrees  with  ON.  Iiojia  '  move  back- 
wards '  (to  the  quotations  in  Fritzner  may  be  added  Laxd.  49,  15, 
peir  Osvigssynir  hopudu  undan).^  The  original  meaning  seems 
to  have  been  '  bend,  ciu"b,  bow,  stoop,'  either  in  order  to  leap, 
or  to  flee,  from  something  bad,  or  towards  something  good  ; 
cf.  the  subst.  hip,  OE.  hype,  Goth,  hups,  Dan.  hofte,  G.  hiifte,  Lat. 
cubitus,  etc.  (Holthausen,  Aiujlia  Beibl.,  1904,  350,  deals  with 
these  words,  but  does  not  connect  them  with  hop,  -hopu,  or  hope.) 
The  transition  from  bodily  movement  to  the  spiritual  '  hope  '  may 
have  been  favoured  by  the  existence  of  the  verb  OE.  hogian 
'  think,'  but  is  not  in  itself  more  difficult  than  with,  e.g.,  Lat. 
ex{s)ultare  'leap  up,  rejoice,'  or  Dan.  lide  pa  'lean  to,  confide  in, 
trust,'  tillid  '  confidence,  reliance  '  ;  and  a  new  word  for  '  hope  ' 
was  required  because  the  old  luen  (Goth,  wens),  vb.  wenan,  had 
at  an  early  age  acquired  a  more  general  meaning  '  opinion, 
probability/  vb.  '  suppose,  imagine.'  The  difficulty  that  the 
word  for  '  iiope  '  has  single  or  short  p  (in  Swed.,  however,  pp), 
while  Jtop,  OE.  hoppian,  has  double  or  long  p,  is  no  serious 
hindrance  to  our  etymology,  because  the  gemination  may  easily 
be  accounted  for  on  the  principle  mentioned  below  (Ch.  XX 
§  9),  that  is,  as  giving  a  more  vivid  expression  of  the  rapid^ 
action. 

XVL— §  5.  Requirements. 

It  is,  of  course,  impossible  to  determine  once  for  all  by  hard- 
and-fast  rules  how  gi-eat  the  correspondence  must  be  for  us  to 
recognize  two  words  as  '  etymologically  identical,'  nor  to  say 
to  which  of  the  tAvo  sides,  the  phonetic  and  the  semantic,  we 
should  attach  the  gi-eater  importance.  With  the  rise  of  historical 
phonology  the  tendency  has  been  to  require  exact  correspondence 
in  the  former  respect,  and  in  semantics  to  be  content  with 
more  or  less  easily  fomid  parallels.     One  example  v,'\\\  shoAv  hoAV 

^  Westphalian  also  has  happen  '  zuriickweichen,'  ESt.  64.  88. 


§  5]  REQUIREMENTS  811 

particular  many  scholars  are  in  matters  of  sound.  The  word  mit 
(OE.  hnutu,  G.  miss,  ON.  knot,  Dan.  m^d)  is  by  Paul  declared  "  not 
related  to  Lat.  mix  "  and  by  Kluge  "  neither  originally  akin  ■with 
nor  borrowed  from  Lat.  mix,"  while  the  NED  does  not  even  mention 
nux  and  thus  must  think  it  quite  impossible  to  connect  it  with 
the  English  word.  We  have  here  in  two  related  languages  two 
words  resejnbling  each  other  not  only  in  sound,  but  in  stem- 
formation  and  gender,  and  possessing  exactly  the  same  signification, 
which  is  as  concrete  and  definite  as  possible.  And  yet  we  are 
bidden  to  keep  them  asunder  !  Fortunately  I  am  not  the  first 
to  protest  against  such  barbarity  :  H.  Pedersen  (KZ  n.f.  12.  251) 
explains  both  words  from  *dmih-,  which  by  metathesis  has 
become  *knud-,  while  Falk  and  Torp  as  well  as  Walde  think 
the  latter  form  the  original  one,  which  in  Latin  has  been 
shifted  into  *dnuk-.  WHiich  of  these  views  is  correct  (both  may 
be  wi-ong)  is  of  less  importance  than  the  ^ictory  of  common 
sense  over  phonological  pedantry. 

There  are  two  explanations  which  have  had  very  often  to  do 
duty  where  the  phonological  correspondence  is  not  exact,  namely 
root- variation  (root-expansion  with  determinatives)  and  apophony 
(ablaut).  Of  the  former  Uhlenbeck  (PBB  30.  252)  says  :  "  The 
theorj''  of  root  determinatives  no  doubt  contains  a  kernel  of  truth, 
but  it  has  only  been  fatal  to  etymological  science,  as  it  has  drawn 
the  attention  from  real  correspondences  between  well-substantiated 
words  to  delusive  similarities  between  hj^pothetical  abstractions." 
Apophony  inspires  more  confidence,  and  in  many  cases  offers  fully 
reliable  explanations  ;  but  this  principle,  too,  has  been  often 
abused,  and  it  is  difficult  to  find  its  true  limitations.  Many  special 
applications  of  it  appear  questionable ,  thus,  when  G.  stumm,  Dan. 
stum,  is  explained  as  an  apophonic  form  of  the  adj.  stam,  Goth. 
stamms,  from  which  we  have  the  verb  stammer,  G.  stommeln,  Dan. 
stamme  :  is  it  really  probable  that  the  designation  of  muteness 
should  be  taken  from  the  word  for  stammering  1  This  appears 
especially  improbable  when  we  consider  that  at  the  time  when 
the  nev!  word  stumm  made  its  appearance  there  was  already  another 
word  for  '  mute,'  namely  ditmm,  dumb,  the  word  which  has  been 
preserved  in  English.  I  therefore  propose  a  new  et^nnology : 
stumm  is  a  blending  of  the  two  synonyms  stiU{e)  and  dum{b),  made 
up  of  the  beginning  of  the  one  and  the  ending  of  the  other  word  ; 
through  adopting  the  initial  st-  the  word  was  also  associated  with 
stump,  and  we  get  an  exact  correspondence  between  dumm,  dum, 
stumm,  stum,  applied  to  persons,  and  dumpf,  stumpf,  Dan.  dump, 
stump,  applied  to  things.  Note  that  in  those  languages  (G.,  Dan.) 
in  which  the  new  word  stum{m)  was  used,  the  unchanged  dum{m) 
was  free  to  develop  the  new  sense  '  stupid  '  (or  was  the  creation 


312  ETYMOLOGY  [cir.  xvi 

of  stum  occasioned  by  the  old  word  tending  already  to  acquire 
this  secondary  meaning  ?),  while  dumb  in  English  stuck  to  the 
old  signification. 


XVI.— §  6.  Blendings. 

Blendings  of  synonyms  play  a  much  greater  role  in  the  develop- 
ment of  language  than  is  generally  recognized.  Many  instances 
may  be  heard  in  everyday  life.,  most  of  them  being  immediately 
corrected  by  the  speaker  (see  above,  XV  §  4),  but  these  momentary 
lapses  cannot  be  separated  from  other  instances  which  are  of 
more  permanent  value  because  they  are  so  natural  that  they  will 
occur  over  and  over  again  until  speakers  will  hardly  feel  the  blend 
as  anything  else  than  an  ordinary  word.  M.  Bloomfield  (IF  4.  71) 
saj's  that  he  has  been  many  years  conscious  of  an  irrepressible 
desire  to  assimilate  the  two  verbs  quench  and  squelch  in  both 
directions  by  forming  squench  and  quelch,  and  he  has  found  the 
former  word  in  a  negro  story  by  Page.  The  expression  '  irre- 
pressible desire  '  struck  me  on  reading  this,  for  I  have  myself  in 
my  Danish  speech  the  same  feeling  whenever  I  am  to  speak  of 
tending  a  patient,  for  I  nearly'  always  say  phsse  as  a  result  of 
wavering  between  ^^Zeje  |jJ?ai9]  and  passe.  Man}'  examples  may  be 
found  in  G.  A.  Bergstrom,  On  Blendings  of  Synonymous  or  Cognate 
Expressions  in  English,  Lund,  1900,  and  Louise  Pound,  Blends, 
Their  Relation  to  English  Word  Formation,  Heidelberg,  1914.  But 
neither  of  these  two  \\Titers  has  seen  the  full  extent  of  this  principle 
of  formation,  which  explains  many  words  of  greater  importance 
than  those  nonce  words  which  are  found  so  plentifully  in  Miss 
Pound's  paper.  Let  me  give  some  examples,  some  of  them  new, 
some  already  found  by  others  : 

blot  =  6Zemish,  bla,ck  -f-  spof,    pZo/,    dot ;    there    is    also   an 

obsolete  s'plot. 
blunt  =  blind  -}-  stunt. 

crouch  =  cringe,  crook,  crawl,  fcrowk  -f  couch, 
flush  =  fla,sh  -\-  hlusJi. 
frush  =  frog  +  thrush  (all  three  names  of  the  same  di-sease 

in  a  horse's  foot). 
glaze  (Shakespeare)  —  glare  -\-  gaze. 
good-bye  =  good-night,  (/ooff-morning  +  godbye  (God  be  with 

ye). 

knoll  =  knell  +  toll. 

scroll  =  scroiv  -f  roll. 

slash  =  slay,  sling,  sht  -{■  gash,  dash. 

slender  =  slight  {slim)  -{-  tender. 


§G]  BLENDIXGS  313 

Such  blends  are  especially  frequent  in  words  expressive  of 
sounds  or  in  some  other  way  symbolical,  as,  for  instance  : 

flurry  =  flhig,  flow  and  many  other  j^-words  +  hurry  (note 

also  scurry), 
gruff  =  qruxw,  grhw  -\-  rough, 
slide  =  sZip  +  gZ/(Ze. 
troll  —  trill  +  roll    (in    some    senses    perhaps    rather    from 

/read,  /rundle  +  roll), 
twirl  =  twist  ~  ivhirl. 

In  slang  blends  abound,  e.g.  : 

tosh     (Harrow)  =  tub  +  wash.     (Sometimes    explained     as 

toe-wash.) 
blarmed  =  bhmed,    6?essed    and    other    6/-words  +  darned 

(damned). 
be  danged  =  (famned  +  hanged. 
I  swow  =  sive^r  +  \ow. 
brunch  =  6reakfast  +  \unch   (so   also,   though   more   rarely 

br upper   (...-}-  supper),   tunch   (tea  +  hmch),   tupper 

=  ten,  +  supper).'^ 

XVI.— §  7.  Echo-words. 

]\Iost  etymologists  are  verj'  reluctant  to  admit  echoism  ;  thus 
Diez  rejects  onomatopoeic  origin  of  It.  pisciare,  Fr.  _2:)?<sser — an 
echo-word  if  ever  there  was  one — and  says,  "  One  can  easily  go  too 
far  in  supposing  onomatopoeia  :  as  a  rule  it  is  more  advisable  to 
build  on  existing  words  "  ;  this  he  does  by  deriving  this  verb  from 
a  non-existing  ^pipisare,  2^ipsare,  from  pi2M  '  pipe,  tube.'  Falk 
and  Toi'p  refer  dumj)  (Dan.  dumpe)  to  Swed.  dimpa,  a  Gothonic 
root  demp,  supposed  to  be  an  extension  of  an  Aryan  root  dhen  : 
thus  the}^  are  too  deaf  to  hear  the  sound  of  the  heavy  fall  expressed 
by  um{p),  cf.  Dan.  bumpe,  bums,  plumpe,  skumpe,  j^impe,  and 
similar  words  in  other  languages. 

It  may  be  fancy,  but  I  think  I  hear  the  same  sound  in  Lat. 
2)lumbum,  which  I  take  to  mean  at  first  not  the  metal,  but  the 
plummet  that  was  dumped  or  plumped  into  the  water  and  was 
denominated  from  the  sound  ;  as  this  was  generally  made  of  lead, 
the  word  came  to  be  used  for  the  metal.  Most  etymologists  take 
it  for  granted  that  plumbum  is  a  loan-word,  some  being  honest 
enough  to  confess  that  they  do  not  know  from  what  language, 
while  others  without  the  least  scruple  or  hesitation  say  that  it 
was  taken  from  Iberian  :  our  ignorance  of  that  language  is  so 

*  Lewis  Carrol's  *  portmanteau  words '  are,  of  course,  famous. 


314  ETYMOLOGY  [ch.  xvi 

deep  that  no  one  can  enter  an  expert's  protest  against  such  a 
supposition.^  But  if  my  h_Aq)othosis  is  right,  the  words  plummet 
(from  OFr.  plommet,  a  diminutive  of  p)lomb)  as  ^^ell  as  the  verb 
Fr.  plonger,  whence  E.  plunge,  from  Lat.  *plumbicare,  are  not 
only  derivatives  from  j^l^onbitm  (the  only  thing  mentioned  by  other 
scholars),  but  also  echo-words,  and  they,  or  at  any  rate  the  verb, 
must  to  a  great  extent  owe  their  diffiision  t-o  their  felicitously 
sjnnbolic  sound.  In  a  novel  I  find  :  "  Plump  went  the  lead  " — 
showing  how  this  sound  is  still  found  adequate  to  express  the 
falling  of  the  lead  in  sounding.  The  NED  says  under  the  verb 
plum]^  :  "  Some  have  compared  L.  plumbare  ...  to  throw  the 
lead-line  .  .  .  but  the  approacli  of  form  between  j^J^nihar  and  the 
LG.  plump-j^hmj}  group  seems  merely  fortuitous  "  (!).  I  see 
sound  s3'mbolism  in  all  the  words  plump,  while  the  NED  will  only 
allow  it  in  the  most  obvious  cases.  From  the  sound  of  a  body 
plumping  into  the  water  we  have  interesting  developments  in  the 
adverb,  as  in  the  following  quotations  :  I  said,  plump  out,  that 
I  couldn't  stand  any  more  of  it  (Bernard  Shaw)  |  The  famous 
diatribe  against  Jesuitism  points  plumb  in  the  same  direction 
(Morley)  [  fall  plum  into  the  jaws  of  certain  critics  (Swift)  |  Nollie 
was  a  plumb  little  idiot  (Galsworthy).  In  the  last  sense  '  entirely  ' 
it  is  especiallj^  frequent  in  America,  e.g.  They  lost  their  senses, 
plumb  lost  their  senses  (Churchill)  |  she's  plum  crazy,  it's  plum 
bad,  etc.  Related  words  for  fall,  etc.,  are  plop,  phut,  plunk, 
plounce.  Much  might  also  be  said  in  this  connexion  of  various 
pop  and  606  words,  but  I  shall  refrain. 


XVI.— §8.  Some  Conjunctions. 

Sometimes  obviouslj-  correct  etjnnologies  yet  leave  some  psycho- 
logical points  unexplained.  One  of  my  pet  theories  concerns  some 
adversative  conjunctions.  Lat.  sed  has  been  supplanted  by 
magis  :  It.  ma,  Sp.  ma,^,  Fr.  mais.  The  transition  is  easily  accounted 
for  ;  from  '  more  '  it  is  no  far  cr}'  to  '  rather  '  (cf.  G.  viehnehr), 
which  can  readily  be  emploj-ed  to  correct  or  gainsay  what  has 
just  been  said.  The  Scandinavian  word  for  '  but  '  is  me7i,  which 
came  into  use  in  the  fifteenth  century  and  is  explained  as  a  blending 

*  Speculation  has  been  rife,  but  without  any  generally  accepted  results, 
as  to  the  relation  between  plnmbiitn  and  words  for  the  same  metal  in  cognate 
languages  :  Gr.  molibos,  molubdos  and  similar  forms,  Ir.  luaide,  E.  lead  (G. 
lot,  '  plummet,  half  an  ounce  '),  Scand.  bly,  OSlav.  olovo,  OPruss.  alwis  ;  see 
Curtius,  Prellwitz,  Boisacq,  Hirt  Idg.  686,  Schrtuler  Sprachvergl.  u.  Vrgesch., 
3d.  ed.,  ii.  1.  9.5  ;  Herm.  Mdller,  Sml.  Olossar  87,  says  that  molibos  and 
plumbum  are  extensions  of  the  root  m-l  '  mollis  esse  '  and  explains  the  differ- 
ence between  the  initial  sounds  by  referring  to  multum  :  comp.  plus — certainly 
most  ingenious,  but  not  convincing.  Some  of  these  words  may  originally 
have  been  echo-words  for  the  plumping  plummet. 


§8]  SOME   CONJUNCTIONS  315 

of  meden  in  its  shortened  form  men  (now  mens)  '  while  '  and  Low 
German  me)i  "  but,'  which  stands  for  older  niwan,  from  the  negative 
ni  and  loan  '  wanting '  ;  the  meaning  has  developed  through  that 
of  '  except  '  and  the  sound  is  easily  understood  as  an  instance  of 
assimilation.  The  same  phonetic  development  is  foimd  in  Dutch 
maar,  OFris.  mar,  from  en  ivare  '  were  not,'  the  same  combination 
which  has  yielded  G.  nur.  Thus  we  have  four  different  ways  of 
getting  to  expressions  for  '  but,'  none  of  which  presents  the  least 
difficulty  to  those  familiar  \Aith  the  semantic  ways  of  words.  But 
why  did  these  various  nations  seize  on  new  words  ?  Weren't  the 
old  ones  good  enough  ? 

Here  I  must  call  attention  to  two  features  that  are  common 
to  these  new  conjunctions,  first  their  syntactic  position,  which 
is  invariably  in  the  beginning  of  the  sentence,  while  such  synony- 
mous words  as  Lat.  autem  and  G.  aher  may  be  placed  after  one 
or  more  words  ;  then  their  phonetic  agi'eement  in  one  point :  magis, 
men,  maar  all  begin  with  m.  Now,  both  these  features  are  found 
in  two  words  for  '  but,'  about  whose  etymological  origin  I  can 
find  no  information,  Finnic  mutta  and  Santal  menkkan,  as  well  as 
in  me,  which  is  used  in  the  Ancrene  Riwle  and  a  few  other  early 
I\Dddle  English  texts  and  has  been  dubiously  connected  with  the 
Scandinavian  (and  French  ?)  word.  How  are  we  to  explain  these 
curious  coincidences  ?  I  think  by  the  nature  of  the  sound  [m], 
which  is  produced  when  the  lips  are  closed  while  the  tongue  rests 
passiveh'  and  the  soft  palate  is  lowered  so  as  to  allow  air  to  escape 
through  the  nostrils — in  short,  the  position  which  is  typical  of 
anybody  who  is  quietly  thinking  over  matters  without  as  yet 
saying  anything,  with  the  sole  difference  that  in  his  case  the  vocal 
chords  are  passive,  while  they  are  made  to  vibrate  to  bring  forth 
an  m. 

Now,  it  Yeiy  often  happens  that  a  man  wants  to  say  something, 
but  has  not  yet  made  up  his  mind  as  to  what  to  say  ;  and  in  this 
moment  of  hesitation,  while  thoughts  are  in  the  process  of  con- 
ception, the  lungs  and  vocal  chords  will  often  be  prematurely 
set  going,  and  the  result  is  [m]  (sometimes  preceded  by  the  cor- 
responding voiceless  sound),  often  written  hm  or  h'm,  which  thus 
becomes  the  interjection  of  an  unshaped  contradiction.  Not 
infrequently  this  [m]  precedes  a  real  word  ;  thus  M'yes  (written 
in  this  way  by  Shaw,  Misalliance  154,  and  Merrick,  Conrad  179) 
and  Dan.  mja,  to  mark  a  hesitating  consent. 

This  will  make  it  clear  why  words  beginning  with  m  are  so 
often  chosen  as  adversative  conjiinctions  :  people  begin  with  this 
sound  and  go  on  with  some  word  that  gives  good  sense  and  which 
happens  to  begin  witli  m  :  mais,  maar.  The  Dan.  men  in  the 
mouth  of  some  early  speakers  is  probably  this  [m],  sliding  into 


310  ETYMOLOGY  [cH.  xvi 

the  old  conjunction  en,  just  as  myes  is  w  +  y^  ',  while  other  original 
users  of  men  may  have  been  thinking  of  men  =  meden,  and  others 
again  of  Low  German  rtien :  these  three  et}Tnologies  are  not 
mutually  destructive,  for  all  three  origins  may  have  concurrently 
contributed  to  the  pojDuIaritj'  of  men.  Modern  Greek  and  Serbian 
ma  are  generally  explained  as  direct  loans  from  Italian,  but  may 
be  indigenous,  as  may  also  dialectal  Rumanian  ma  in  the  same 
sense,  for  in  the  hesitating  [m]  as  the  initial  soimd  of  objections 
we  have  one  of  those  touches  of  nature  which  make  the  whole 
world  kin.^ 


XVL— §  9.  Object  of  Etymology. 

What  is  the  object  of  etymological  science  1  "  To  determine 
the  true  signification  of  a  word,"  answers  one  of  the  masters  of 
etymological  research  (Walde,  Lat.  et.  Worterb.  xi).  But  surely 
in  most  cases  that  can  be  achieved  without  the  help  of  etymology. 
We  know  the  true  sense  of  hundreds  of  words  about  the  etymology 
of  which  we  are  in  complete  ignorance,  and  we  should  know  exactly 
what  the  word  grog  means,  even  if  the  tradition  of  its  origin  had 
been  accidentally  lost.  Many  people  still  believe  that  an  account 
of  the  origin  of  a  name  throws  some  light  on  the  essence  of  the 
thing  it  stands  for  ;  when  they  want  to  define  say  '  religion  '  or 
'  civilization,'  they  start  b^'^  stating  the  (real  or  supposed)  origin 
of  the  name — but  surely  that  is  superstition,  though  the  first  framers 
of  the  name  '  etymology  '  (from  Gr.  etumon  '  true  ')  must  have  had 
the  same  idea  in  their  heads.  Etymologj'  tells  us  ncthing  about 
the  things,  nor  even  about  the  present  meaning  of  a  word,  but 
only  about  the  way  in  which  a  word  has  come  into  existence. 
At  best,  it  tells  us  not  what  is  true,  but  what  has  been  true. 

The  overestimation  of  etymology  is  largely  attributable  to 
the  "  conviction  that  there  can  be  nothing  in  language  that  had 
not  an  intelligible  purpose,  that  there  is  nothing  that  is  now 
irregular  that  was  not  at  first  regular,  nothing  irrational  that  was 
not  originall}'  rational  "  (Max  Miiller) — a  conviction  which  is  still 
found  to  underlie  many  utterances  about  linguistic  matters,  but 
which  readers  of  the  present  volume  will  have  seen  is  erroneous 
in  many  M'ays.  On  the  whole,  Max  Miiller  naively  gives  expression 
to  what  is  imconsciously  at  the  back  of  much  that  is  said  and 
believed  about  language  ;  thus,  when  he  says  (L  1.  44)  :  "  I  must 
ask  you  at  present  to  take  it  for  granted  that  everything  in  language 
had  originallj'  a  meaning.  As  language  can  have  no  other  object 
but  to  express  our  meaning,  it  might  seem  to  follow  almost  by 

^  I  have  discussed  this  more  in  detail  and  added  other  »n-words  of  a 
somewhat  related  character  in  Studier  tillegnade  E.  Tegnir,  1918,  p.  49  fit. 


§9]  OBJECT   OF   ET\nVIOLOGY  317 

necessity  that  language  should  contain  neither  more  nor  less  than 
what  is  required  for  that  purpose."  Yes,  so  it  would  if  language 
had  been  constructed  by  an  omniscient  and  omnipotent  being, 
but  as  it  was  developed  by  imperfect  human  beings,  there  is  every 
possibility  of  their  having  failed  to  achieve  their  purpose  and 
having  done  either  more  or  less  than  was  required  to  express 
their  meaning.  It  would  be  wrong  to  say  that  language  (i.e. 
speaking  man)  created  first  what  was  strictly  necessarj',  and  after- 
wards what  might  be  considered  superfluous  ;  but  it  would  be 
equally  wrong  to  say  that  linguistic  luxuries  were  always  created 
before  necessaries  ;  yet  that  view  would  probably  be  nearer  the 
truth  than  the  former.  Much  of  what  in  former  ages  was  felt 
to  be  necessary  to  express  thoughts  was  afterwards  felt  as  pedantic 
crisscross  and  gradually  eliminated  ;  but  at  all  times  many  things 
have  been  found  in  language  that  can  never  have  been  anything 
else  but  superfluous,  exactly  as  many  people  use  a  great  many 
superfluous  gestm'es  which  are  not  in  the  least  significant  and  in 
no  way  assist  the  comprehension  of  their  intentions,  but  which 
they  somehow  feel  an  impulse  to  perform.  In  language,  as  in 
life  generally,  we  have  too  little  in  some  respects,  and  too  much 
in  others. 


XVI. — §  10.  Reconstruction. 

Kluge  somewhere  (PBB  37.  479,  1911)  says  that  the  establish- 
ment of  the  common  Aryan  language  is  the  chief  task  of  our 
modern  science  of  linguistics  (to  my  mind  it  can  never  be  more 
than  a  fragment  of  that  task,  which  must  be  to  understand  the 
nature  of  language),  and  he  thinks  optimistically  that  "  recon- 
structions with  their  reliable  methods  have  taken  so  firm  root 
that  we  are  convinced  that  we  know  the  common  Aryan  grund- 
sprache  just  as  thoroughly  as  any  language  that  is  more  or  less 
authenticated  through  literature."  This  is  a  palpable  exaggera- 
tion, for  no  one  nowadays  has  the  com-age  of  Schleicher  to  print 
even  the  smallest  fable  in  Proto-Ai-yan,  and  if  by  some  miraculous 
accident  we  were  to  find  a  text  wTitten  in  that  language  we  may 
be  sure  it  would  puzzle  us  just  as  much  as  Tokharian  does. 

Reconstruction  has  two  sides,  an  outer  and  an  inner.  With 
regard  to  sounds,  it  seems  to  me  that  very  often  the  masters  of 
linguistics  treat  us  to  reconstructed  forms  that  are  little  short 
of  impossible.  This  is  not  the  place  to  give  a  detailed  criticism 
of  the  famous  theory  of  '  nasalis  sonans,'  but  I  hope  elsewhere 
to  be  able  to  state  why  I  think  this  theory  a  disfiguring  ex- 
crescence on  linguistic  science :  no  one  has  ever  been  able  to  find 
in  any  existing  language  such  forms  as  mnto  with  stressed  syllabic 


318  ETYMOLOGY  [en.  xvi 

[n],  given  as  the  old  form  of  our  word  movlh  (Falk  and  Torp  even 
give  stmnto  in  order  to  connect  the  word  with  Gr.  stoma),  or  as 
dhntom  (\\ hence  Lat.  centum,  etc.)  or  bhnjhnties  or  gnmskete 
(Brugmann).  Not  only  are  these  forms  phonetically  impossible, 
but  the  theor}-  fails  to  explain  the  transitions  to  the  forms  actually 
existing  in  real  languages,  and  everything  is  much  easier  if  we 
assume  forms  like  [Am,  An]  with  some  vowel  like  that  of  P].  7m-. 
The  use  in  Proto- Aryan  reconstructions  of  non -syllabic  i  and  u  also 
in  some  respects  invites  criticism,  but  it  will  be  better  to  treat 
these  questions  in  a  special  paper. 

Semantic  reconstruction  calls  for  little  comment  here.  It  is 
evident  from  the  nature  of  the  subject  that  no  such  strict  rules 
can  be  given  in  this  domain  as  in  the  domain  of  sound  ;  but  now- 
adays scholars  are  more  realistic  than  formerly.  Most  of  them 
will  feel  satisfied  when  moo7i  and  rnontJi  are  associated  with  words 
having  the  same  two  significati{»ns  in  related  languages,  without 
indulging  in  explanations  of  both  from  a  root  me  '  to  measure  '  ; 
and  when  our  daughter  has  been  connected  with  Gr.  thvgdter, 
Skt.  duhitdr  and  corresponding  words  in  other  languages,  no  attempt 
is  made  to  go  beyond  the  meaning  common  to  these  words 
'  daughter  '  and  to  speculate  what  had  induced  our  ancestors  to 
bestow  that  word  on  that  particular  relation,  as  when  Lassen 
derived  it  fi*om  the  root  duh  '  to  milk  '  and  pictured  an  idyllic 
family  life,  in  which  it  was  the  business  of  the  young  girls  to  milk 
the  co\\s,  or  when  Fick  derived  the  same  word  from  the  root  dheugh 
'  to  be  useful  '  (G.  taugen  :  '  wie  die  magd,  maid  von  mogen  '),  as 
if  the  daughters  were  the  only,  or  the  most,  efficient  members 
of  the  family.  Unfortunately,  such  speculations  are  still  found 
lingering  in  many  recent  handbooks  of  high  standing  :  Kluge 
hesitates  w'hether  to  assign  the  word  mutter,  another,  to  the  root 
ma  in  the  sense  '  mete  out '  or  in  the  sense  found  in  Sanskrit  '  to 
form,'  used  of  the  foetus  in  the  womb.  A  resigned  acquiescence 
in  inevitable  ignorance  and  a  sense  of  reality  should  certainly  be 
characteristics  of  future  etymologists. 


CHAPTER   XVII 
PROGRESS    OR    DECAY? 

§  1.  Linguistic  Estimation.  §2.  Degeneration?  §3.  Appreciation  of  Modern 
Tongues.  §  4.  The  Scientific  Attitude.  §  5.  Final  Answer.  §  6. 
Sounds.  §  7.  Shortenings.  §  8.  Objections.  Result.  §  9.  Verbal 
Forms.     §  10.  Sj^nthesis  and  Analysis.     §  11.  Verbal  Concord. 

XVn.— §  1.  Linguistic  Estimation. 

The  common  belief  of  linguists  that  one  form  or  one  expression 
is  just  as  good  as  another,  provided  they  are  both  found  in  actual 
use,  and  that  each  language  is  to  be  considered  a  perfect  vehicle 
for  the  thoughts  of  the  nation  speaking  it,  is  in  some  ways  the 
exact  counterpart  of  the  conviction  of  the  Manchester  school  of 
economics  that  everything  is  for  the  best  in  the  best  of  all  possible 
worlds  if  only  no  artificial  hindrances  are  put  in  the  way  of  free 
exchange,  for  demand  and  supply  will  regulate  everything  better 
than  any  Government  would  be  able  to.  Just  as  economists  were 
blind  to  the  numerous  cases  in  which  actual  wants,  even  crying 
wants,  Avere  not  satisfied,  so  also  linguists  were  deaf  to  those  in- 
stances which  are,  however,  obvious  to  whoever  has  once  turned 
his  attention  to  them,  in  which  the  very  structure  of  a  language 
calls  forth  misunderstandings  in  everyday  conversation,  and  in 
which,  consequently,  a  word  has  to  be  repeated  or  modified  or 
expanded  or  defined  in  order  to  call  forth  the  idea  intended  by 
the  speaker  :  he  took  his  stick — no,  not  John's,  but  his  own ; 
or  :  I  mean  you  in  the  plural  (or,  you  all,  or  you  girls)  ;  no,  a 
box  on  the  ear ;  un  de  a  jouer,  non  i^as  un  de  a  coudre  ;  nein,  ich 
meine  Sie  personlich  (with  very  strong  stress  on  Sie),  etc.  Every 
careful  writer  in  any  language  has  had  the  experience  that  on 
re-reading  his  manuscript  he  has  discovered  that  a  sentence  which 
he  thought  perfectly  clear  when  he  wrote  it  lends  itself  to  mis- 
understanding and  has  to  be  put  in  a  different  way  ;  sometimes 
he  has  to  add  a  clarifying  parenthesis,  because  his  language  is 
defective  in  some  respect,  as  when  Edward  Carpenter  {Art  o/ 
Creation  171),  in  speaking  of  the  deification  of  the  Babe,  writes: 
"It  is  not  likely  that  Man — the  human  male — left  to  himself 
would  have  done  this  ;  but  to  woman  it  was  natural,"  thus  avoiding 
the  misunderstanding  that  he  was  speaking  of  the  whole  species, 

319 


820  PROGRESS   OR  DECAY?  [ch.  xvii 

comprising  both  sexes.  Herbert  Spencer  writes  :  "  Charles  had 
recently  obtained — a  post  in  the  Post  Office  I  Avas  about  to  say, 
but  the  cacophony  stopped  me  ;  and  then  I  was  about  to  say, 
an  office  in  the  Post  Office,  which  is  nearly  as  bad  ;  let  me  say — 
a  place  in  the  Post  Office  "  {Autobiogr.  2.  73 — but  of  course  the 
defect  is  not  really  one  of  sound,  as  implied  by  the  expression 
'  cacophonj','  but  one  of  signification,  as  both  words  post  and 
office  are  ambiguous,  and  the  attempted  collocation  would  therefore 
puzzle  the  reader  or  hearer,  because  the  same  word  A\ouId  have 
to  be  apprehended  in  two  different  senses  in  close  succession). 
Similar  instances  might  be  alleged  from  any  language. 

No  language  is  perfect,  but  if  we  admit  this  truth  (or  truism), 
we  must  also  admit  by  implication  that  it  is  not  unreasonable 
to  investigate  the  relative  value  of  different  languages  or  of  different 
details  in  languages.  When  comparative  linguists  set  themselves 
against  the  narrowmindedness  of  classical  scholars  who  thought 
Latin  and  Greek  the  only  A\orthy  objects  of  stud}^  and  emphasized 
the  value  of  all,  even  the  least  literary  languages  and  dialects, 
they  were  primarily'  thinking  of  their  value  to  the  scientist,  who 
finds  something  of  interest  in  each  of  them,  but  they  had  no  idea 
of  comparing  the  relative  value  of  languages  from  the  point  of 
view  of  their  users — and  yet  the  latter  comparison  is  of  much 
greater  importance  than  the  former. 


XVII.— §2.  Degeneration? 

People  will  often  use  the  expressions  '  evolution  '  rnd  '  develop- 
ment '  in  connexion  Avith  language,  but  most  linguists,  when  taken 
to  task,  will  maintain  that  these  expressions  as  applied  to  languages 
should  be  used  without  the  implication  which  is  commonly  attached 
to  them  when  used  of  other  objects,  namel}^  that  there  is  a  pro- 
gressive tendency  towards  something  better  or  nearer  perfection. ' 
They  will  say  that  '  evolution  '  means  here  simply  changes  going 
on  in  languages,  without  any  judgment  as  to  the  value  of  these 
changes. 

But  those  who  do  pronounce  such  a  judgment  ncarl}'  always 
take  the  changes  as  a  retrogressive  rather  than  a  progressive 
development :  "  Tongues,  like  governments,  have  a  natural  ten- 
dency to  degeneration,"  said  Dr.  Samuel  Johnson  in  the  Pi-eface 
to  his  Dictionary,  and  the  same  lament  has  been  often  repeated 
since  his  time.  This  is  quite  natural :  people  have  always  had 
a  tendency  to  believe  in  a  golden  age,  that  is,  in  a  remote  past 
gloriously  different  to  the  miserable  present.  Why  not,  then, 
have  the  same  belief  with  regard  to  language,  the  more  so  because 
one  cannot  fail  to  notice  things  in  contemporary  speech  which 


§2]  DEGENERATION?  321 

(superficially  at  any  rate)  look  like  corruptions  of  the  '  good  old  ' 
forms  ?  Everything  '  old  '  thus  comes  to  be  considered  '  good.' 
Lowell  and  others  think  they  have  justified  many  of  the  commonly 
reviled  Americanisms  if  they  are  able  to  show  them  to  have  existed 
in  England  in  the  sixteenth  century,  and  similar  considerations 
are  met  with  everywhere.  The  same  frame  of  mind  finds  support 
in  the  usual  grammar-school  admiration  for  the  two  classical 
languages  and  their  literatures.  People  were  taught  to  look 
down  upon  modern  languages  as  mere  dialects  or  patois  and  to 
worship  Greek  and  Latin  ;  the  richness  and  fullness  of  forms  found 
in  those  languages  came  naturally  to  be  considered  the  very  beau 
ideal  of  linguistic  structm-e.  Bacon  gives  a  classical  expression 
to  this  view  when  he  declares  "  ingenia  prior um  seculorum  nostris 
fuisse  multo  acutiora  et  subtiliora  "  {De  augm.  scient}).  To  men 
fresh  from  the  ordinary  grammar-school  training,  no  language 
would  seem  really  respectable  that  had  not  four  or  five  distinct 
cases  and  three  genders,  or  that  had  less  than  five  tenses  and  as 
many  moods  in  its  verbs.  Accordingly,  such  poor  languages  as 
had  either  lost  much  of  their  original  richness  in  grammatical 
forms  {e.g.  French,  English,  or  Danish),  or  had  never  had  any,  so 
far  as  one  knew  {e.g.  Chinese),  were  naturally  looked  upon  with 
sometliing  of  the  pity  bestowed  on  relatives  in  reduced  circum- 
stances, or  the  contempt  felt  for  foreign  paupers.  It  is  well  known 
how  in  West-Em-opean  languages,  in  English,  German,  Danish, 
Swedish,  Dutch,  French,  etc.,  obsolete  forms  were  artificially  kept 
alive  and  preferred  to  younger  forms  by  most  grammarians  ;  but 
we  see  exactly  the  same  point  of  view  in  such  a  language  as  Magyar, 
where,  under  the  influence  of  the  historical  studies  of  the  grammarian 
Revai,  the  belief  in  the  excellence  of  the  '  veneranda  antiquitas ' 
as  compared  with  the  corruj)tion  of  the  modern  language  has 
been  prevalent  in  schools  and  in  literature.  (See  Simony i  US  259 ; 
cf.  on  Modern  Greek  and  Telugu  above,  p.  SOL) 

Comparative  linguists  had  one  more  reason  for  adopting  this 
manner  of  estimating  languages.  To  what  had  the  great  victories 
won  by  their  science  been  due  ?  Whence  had  they  got  the  material 
for  that  magnificent  edifice  which  had  proved  spacious  enough 
to  hold  Hindus  and  Persians,  Lithuanians  and  Slavs,  Greeks, 
Romans,  Germans  and  Kelts  ?  Surely  it  was  neither  from 
Modern  English  nor  Modern  Danish,  but  from  the  oldest  stages  of 
each  linguistic  group.     The  older  a  linguistic  document  was,  the 

1  Quoted  here  from  John  Wilkins,  An  Essay  towards  a  Real  Character 
and  a  Philosophical  Language,  1668,  p.  448  :  Wilkins  there  subjects  Bacon's 
saying  to  a  crushing  criticism,  laying  bare  a  great  many  radical  deficiencies 
in  Latin  to  bring  out  the  logical  advantages  of  his  own  artificial  '  philo- 
sophical '  language. 

21 


322  PROGRESS   OR  DECAY?  [ch.  xvii 

more  valuable  it  was  to  the  first  generation  of  comparative  linguists. 
An  English  form  like  had  was  of  no  great  use,  but  Gothic  habaide- 
deima  was  easily  picked  to  pieces,  and  each  of  its  several  elements 
lent  itself  capitally  to  comparison  with  Sanskiit,  Lithuanian  and 
Greek.  The  linguist  was  chiefly  dependent  for  his  material  on 
the  old  and  archaic  languages  ;  his  interest  centred  round  their 
fuller  forms  :  what  wonder,  then,  if  in  his  opinion  those  languages 
were  superior  to  all  others  ?  What  wonder  if  by  comparing  had 
and  habaidedeima  he  came  to  regard  the  English  form  as  a  mutilated 
and  worn-out  relic  of  a  splendid  original  ?  or  if,  noting  the  change 
from  the  old  to  the  modern  form,  he  used  strong  language  and 
spoke  of  degeneration,  corruption,  depravation,  decUne,  phonetic 
decay,  etc.  ? 

The  view  that  the  modern  languages  of  Europe,  Persia  and 
India  are  far  inferior  to  the  old  languages,  or  the  one  old  language, 
from  which  they  descend,  we  have  already  encountered  in  the 
historical  part  of  this  work,  in  Bopp,  Humboldt,  Grimm  and  their 
followers.  It  looms  very  large  in  Schleicher,  according  to  whom 
the  history  of  language  is  all  a  Decline  and  Fall,  and  in  Max  Miiller, 
who  says  that  "  on  the  whole,  the  history  of  all  the  Aryan  languages 
is  nothing  but  a  gradual  process  of  decay."  Nor  is  it  yet  quite 
extinct. 


XVn.— §  3.  Appreciation  of  Modern  Tongues. 

Some  scholars,  however,  had  an  indistinct  feeling  that  this 
unconditional  and  wholesale  depreciation  of  modcx-n  languages 
could  not  contain  the  whole  truth,  and  I  have  collected  various 
passages,  nearly  always  of  a  perfunctory  or  incidental  character, 
in  which  these  languages  are  partly  rehabilitated.  Humboldt 
(Versch  284)  speaks  of  the  modern  use  of  auxiliary  verbs  and 
prepositions  as  a  convenience  of  the  intellect  which  may  even  in 
some  isolated  instances  lead  to  greater  definiteness.  On  Grimm 
see  above,  p.  62.  Rask  (SA  1.  191)  says  that  it  is  possible  that  the 
advantages  of  simplicity  may  be  greater  than  those  of  an 
elaborate  linguistic  structure.  Madvig  turns  against  the  uncritical 
admiration  of  the  classical  languages,  but  does  not  go  fuither 
than  sajing  that  the  modern  analj^tical  languages  are  just  as 
good  as  the  old  sjTithetic  ones,  for  thoughts  can  be  expressed  in 
both  with  equal  clearness.  Ki-auter  {Archiv  f.  nen.  spr.  57.  204) 
says  :  "  That  decay  is  consistent  with  clearness  and  precision 
is  shown  by  French  ;  that  it  is  not  fatal  to  poetry  is  seen  in  the 
language  of  Shakespeare."  Osthoff  {Schriftspr.  u.  Volksmundart, 
1883,  13)  protests  against  a  one-sided  depreciation  of  the  language 
of  Lessing  and  Goethe  in  favour  of  the  language  of  Wulfila  or 


§8]       APPRECIATION   OF  MODERN  TONGUES       328 

Otfried,  or  vice  versa :  a  language  possesses  an  inestimable  charm 
if  its  phonetic  s\''3tem  remains  unimpaired  and  its  etymologies 
are  transparent ;  but  pliancy  of  the  material  of  language  and 
flexibility  to  express  ideas  is  really  no  less  an  advantage  ;  every- 
thing depends  on  the  point  of  view  :  the  student  of  architecture 
has  one  point  of  view,  the  people  who  are  to  live  in  the  house 
another. 

Among  those  who  thus  half-heartedly  refused  to  accept  the 
downhill  theory  to  its  full  extent  must  be  mentioned  Whitney, 
many  passages  in  whose  writings  show  a  certain  hesitation  to 
make  up  his  mind  on  this  question.  When  speaking  of  the  loss 
of  old  forms  he  says  that  "  some  of  these  could  well  be  spared, 
but  others  were  valuable,  and  their  relinquishment  has  impaired 
the  power  of  expression  of  the  language."  To  phonetic  corruption 
we  owe  true  grammatical  forms,  which  make  the  wealth  of  every 
inflective  language  ;  but  it  is  also  destructive  of  the  very  edifice 
which  it  has  helped  to  build.  He  speaks  of  "  the  legitimate 
tendency  to  neglect  and  eliminate  distinctions  which  are  practically 
unnecessary,"  and  will  not  admit  "  that  we  can  speak  our  minds 
any  less  distinctly  than  our  ancestors  could,  with  all  their  apparatus 
of  inflexions  "  ;  gender  is  a  luxury  which  any  language  can  well 
afford  to  dispense  with,  but  language  is  impoverished  by  the 
obliteration  of  the  subjunctive  mood.  The  giving  up  of  grammatical 
endings  is  akin  to  wastefulness,  and  the  excessive  loss  in  English 
makes  truly  for  decay  (L  31,  73,  74,  76,  77,  84,  85  ;  G  51,  105,  104). 


XVn.— §  4.  The  Scientific  Attitude. 

Why  are  all  such  expressions  either  of  depreciation  or  of  partial 
appreciation  of  the  modern  languages  so  utterly  unsatisfactory  ? 
One  reason  is  that  they  are  so  vague  and  dependent  on  a  general 
feeling  of  inferiority  or  the  reverse,  instead  of  being  based  on  a 
detailed  comparative  estimation  of  real  facts  in  linguistic  structure. 
If,  therefore,  we  want  to  arrive  at  a  scientific  answer  to  the  question 
"  Decay  or  progress  ?  "  we  must  examine  actual  instances  of  changes, 
but  must  take  particular  care  that  these  instances  are  not  chosen 
at  random,  but  are  typical  and  characteristic  of  the  total  structure 
of  the  languages  concerned.  What  is  wanted  is  not  a  comparison 
of  isolated  facts,  but  the  establishment  of  general  laws  and  ten- 
dencies, for  only  through  such  can  we  hope  to  decide  whether 
or  no  we  are  justified  in  using  terms  like  '  development '  and 
'  evolution  '  in  linguistic  history. 

The  second  reason  why  the  earlier  pronouncements  quoted 
above  do  not  satisfy  us  is  that  their  authors  nowhere  raise  the 
question  of  the  method  by  which  linguistic  value  is  to  be  measured, 


824  PROGRESS   OR  DECAY  ?  [ch.  xvii 

by  what  standard  and  what  tests  the  comparative  merits  of 
languages  or  of  forms  are  to  be  ascertained.  Those  linguists 
who  looked  upon  language  as  a  product  of  nature  were  by  that 
very  fact  precluded  from  establishing  a  rational  basis  for  deter- 
mining linguistic  values  ;  nor  is  it  possible  to  find  one  if  we  look 
at  things  from  the  one-sided  point  of  view  of  the  linguistic  historian. 
An  almost  comical  instance  of  this  is  found  when  Curtius  {Sprach- 
wiss.  u.  cluss.  phil.  39)  saj's  that  the  Greek  accusative  poda  is 
better  than  Sanskrit  padam,  because  it  is  possible  at  once  to  see 
that  it  belongs  to  the  third  declension.  What  is  to  be  taken  into 
account  is  of  course  the  interests  of  the  speaking  community, 
and  if  we  consistently  consider  language  as  a  set  of  human  actions 
with  a  definite  end  in  view,  namely,  the  communication  of  thoughts 
and  feelings,  then  it  becomes  easy  to  find  tests  bj^  which  to  measure 
linguistic  values,  for  from  that  point  of  view  it  is  evident  that 

THAT  LANGUAGE  RANKS  HIGHEST  ^VHICH  GOES  FARTHEST  IN  THE 
ART  OF  ACCOaiPLISHING  MUCH  WITH  LITTLE  MEANS,  OR,  IN  OTHER 
WORDS,  W^HICH  IS  ABLE  TO  EXPRESS  THE  GREATEST  AMOUNT  OF 
MEANING   WT;TH   THE    SIMPLEST   MECHANISM. 

The  estimation  has  to  be  thoroughly  and  frankly  anthropo- 
centric.  This  may  be  a  defect  in  other  sciences,  in  which  it  is 
a  merit  on  the  part  of  the  investigator  to  be  able  to  abstract 
himself  from  human  considerations  ;  in  linguistics,  on  the  contrary, 
on  account  of  the  very  nature  of  the  object  of  study,  one  must 
constantly  look  to  the  human  interest,  and  judge  everj'thing  from 
that,  and  from  no  other,  point  of  view.  Otherwise  we  run  the 
risk  of  going  astray  in  all  directions. 

It  will  be  noticed  that  my  formula  contains  two  requirements  : 
it  demands  a  maximum  of  efficiency  and  a  minimum  of  effort. 
Efficiency  means  expressiveness,  and  effort  means  bodily  and 
mental  labour,  and  thus  the  formula  is  simply  one  of  modern 
energetics.  But  unfortimately  we  are  in  possession  of  no  method 
by  wliich  to  measure  either  expressiveness  or  effort  exact Ij-,  and 
in  cases  of  conflict  it  may  be  difficult  to  decide  to  which  of  the 
two  sides  we  are  to  attach  the  greater  importance,  how  great  a 
surplus  of  efficiency  is  required  to  counterbalance  a  surplus 
of  exertion,  or  inversely.  Still,  in  many  cases  no  doubt  can 
arise,  and  we  are  often  able  to  state  progress,  because  there 
is  either  a  clear  gain  in  efficiency  or  a  diminution  of  exertion, 
or  both. 

There  is  one  objection  wliich  is  likely  to  present  itself  to  many 
of  my  readers,  namely,  that  natives  handle  their  language  without 
the  least  exertion  or  effort  (cf.  XIV  §  6,  p.  262).  Madvig  (1857, 
73  ff.  =  Kl  260  ff.)  admits  that  a  simplification  in  linguistic  structure 
will  make  the  language  easier  to  learn  for  foreigners,  but  denies 


§4]  THE   SCIENTIFIC  ATTITUDE  325 

that  it  means  increased  ease  for  the  native.  Similarly  Wechssler 
(L  149)  says  that  "  dcr  begrifif  der  schwierigkeit  und  unbequemheit 
fiir  die  einheimischen  nicht  existiert."  I  might  quote  against 
him  his  countryman  Gabclentz,  who  expressly  says  that  the  diffi- 
culties of  the  German  languages  are  felt  by  natives,  a  view  that 
is  endorsed  by  Schuchardt  in  various  places.^  To  my  mind  there 
is  not  the  slightest  doubt  that  different  languages  differ  very 
much  in  easiness  even  to  native  speakers.  In  the  chapters  devoted 
to  cliildren  we  have  already  seen  that  the  numerous  mistakes 
made  by  them  in  every  possible  way  testify  to  the  labour  involved 
in  learning  one's  own  language.  This  labour  must  naturally  be 
greater  in  the  case  of  a  highly  complicated  linguistic  structure 
with  man}^  rules  and  still  more  exceptions  to  the  rules,  than  in 
languages  constructed  simply  and  regularly. 

Nor  is  the  difficulty  of  correct  speech  confined  to  the  first 
mastering  of  the  language.  Even  to  the  native  who  has  spoken 
the  same  language  from  a  child,  its  daily  use  involves  no  small 
amount  of  exertion.  Under  ordinary  circumstances  he  is  not 
conscious  of  any  exertion  in  speaking ;  but  such  a  want  of  con- 
scious feeling  is  no  proof  that  the  exertion  is  absent.  And  it  is 
a  strong  argument  to  the  contrary  that  it  is  next  to  impossible 
for  you  to  speak  correctly  if  you  are  suffering  from  excessive 
mental  work  ;  you  will  constantly  make  slips  in  grammar  and 
idiom  as  well  as  in  pronunciation  ;  you  have  not  the  same  com- 
mand of  language  as  under  normal  conditions.  If  you  have  to 
speak  on  a  difficult  and  unfamiliar  subject,  on  which  you  would 
not  like  to  say  anything  but  what  is  to  the  point  or  strictlj''  justi- 
fiable, you  will  sometimes  find  that  the  thoughts  themselves  claim 
so  much  mental  energy  that  there  is  none  left  for  speaking  with 
elegance,  or  even  with  complete  regard  to  grammar  :  to  your 
own  vexation  you  will  have  a  feeling  that  your  plu-ases  are  confused 
and  your  language  incorrect.  A  pianist  may  practise  a  difficult 
piece  of  music  so  as  to  have  it  "  at  his  fingers'  ends  "  ;  under 
ordinary  circumstances  he  will  be  able  to  play  it  quite  mechanically, 
without  ever  being  conscious  of  effort ;  but,  nevertheless,  the 
effort  is  there.  How  great  the  effort  is  appears  when  some 
day  or  other  the  musician  is  '  out  of  humoiu','  that  is,  when 
his  brain  is  at  work  on  other  subjects  or  is  not  in  its  usual 
working  order.  At  once  his  execution  will  be  stumbling  and 
faulty. 

1  Cf.  also  what  Paul  says  (P  144)  about  one  point  in  German  grammar 
(strong  and  weak  forms  of  adjectives)  :  "  But  the  difficulty  of  the  correct 
mamtenance  of  the  distinction  is  shown  in  numerous  offences  made  by 
writers  against  the  rules  of  grammar  " — of  course,  not  only  by  writers,  but 
by  ordinary  speakers  as  well. 


826  PROGRESS   OR  DECAY?  [ch.  xvii 

XVn.— §  5.  Final  Answer. 

I  may  here  anticipate  the  reisultfi  of  the  followhig  investigation 
and  say  that  in  all  those  instances  in  which  we  are  able  to  examine 
the  history  of  any  language  for  a  sufficient  length  of  time,  we 
find  that  languages  have  a  progressive  tendency.  But  if  languages 
progress  towards  greater  perfection,  it  is  not  in  a  bee-line,  nor 
are  all  the  changes  we  witness  to  be  considered  steps  in  the  right 
direction.  The  only  thing  I  maintain  is  that  the  sum  total  of  these 
changes,  when  we  compare  a  remx)te  period  with  the  jiT^sent  time, 
shows  a  surplus  of  progressive  over  retrogressive  or  indifferent  changes, 
so  that  the  structure  of  modern  languages  is  nearer  perfection 
than  that  of  ancient  languages,  if  we  take  them  as  wholes  instead 
of  picking  out  at  random  some  one  or  other  more  or  less  signifi- 
cant detail.  And  of  course  it  must  not  be  imagined  that  pro- 
gress has  been  achieved  through  deliberate  acts  of  men  conscious 
that  they  were  improving  their  mother-tongue.  On  the  contrary, 
many  a  step  in  advance  has  at  first  been  a  slip  or  even  a 
blunder,  and,  as  in  other  fields  of  human  activity,  good  results 
have  only  been  won  after  a  good  deal  of  bungling  and  '  muddling 
along.'  ^  My  attitude  towards  this  question  is  the  same  as  that 
of  Leslie  Stephen,  who  writes  in  a  letter  {Life  454) :  "  I  have  a 
perhaps  unreasonable  amount  of  belief,  not  in  a  millennium,  but 
in  the  world  on  the  whole  blundering  rather  forwards  than 
backwards," 

Schleicher  on  one  occasion  used  the  fine  simile :  "  Our  words, 
as  contrasted  with  Gothic  words,  are  like  a  statue  that  has  been 
rolling  for  a  long  time  in  the  bed  of  a  river  till  its  beautiful  limbs 
have  been  worn  ofif,  so  that  now  scarcely  anjrthing  remains  but  a 
polished  stone  cylinder  with  faint  indications  of  what  it  once  was  " 
(D  34).  Let  us  turn  the  tables  by  asking  :  Suppose,  however, 
that  it  would  be  quite  out  of  the  question  to  place  the  statue  on 
a  pedestal  to  be  admired  ;  what  if,  on  the  one  hand,  it  was  not 
ornamental  enough  as  a  work  of  art,  and  if,  on  the  other  hand, 
human  well-being  was  at  stake  if  it  was  not  serviceable  in  a  rolhng- 
mill  :  which  would  then  be  the  better — a  rugged  and  unwieldy 
statue,  making  difficulties  at  every  rotation,  or  an  even,  smooth, 
easygoing  and  well-oiled  roller  ? 

After  these  preliminary  considerations  we  may  now  proceed 
to  a  comparative  examination  of  the  chief  differences  between 
ancient  and  modern  stages  of  our  Western  European  languages. 

1  It  has  often  been  pointed  out  how  Great  Britain  has  '  blundered  ' 
into  creating  her  world-wide  Empire,  and  Gretton,  in  The  King's  Govern- 
ment (1914),  applies  the  same  view  to  the  development  of  governmental 
institutions. 


§  6]  SOUNDS  327 

XVn.— §  6.  Sounds. 

The  student  who  goes  through  the  chapters  devoted  to  sound 
changes  in  historical  and  comparative  grammars  will  have  great 
difficulty  in  getting  at  any  great  lines  of  development  or  general 
tendencies  :  everything  seems  just  haphazard  and  fortuitous  ;  a 
long  i  is  here  shortened  and  there  diphthongized  or  lowered  into  e, 
etc.  The  history  of  sounds  is  dependent  on  surroundings  in  many, 
though  not  in  all  circumstances,  but  surroundings  do  not  always 
act  in  the  same  way  ;  in  short,  there  seem  to  be  so  many  con- 
flicting tendencies  that  no  universal  or  even  general  rules  can  be 
evolved  from  all  these  '  sound  laws,*  Still  less  would  it  seem 
possible  to  state  anything  about  the  comparative  value  of  the 
forms  before  and  after  the  change,  for  it  does  not  seem  to  matter 
a  bit  for  the  speaking  community  whether  it  says  stdn  as  in  Old 
English  or  sto7ie  as  now,  and  thus  in  innumerable  cases.  Nay, 
from  one  point  of  view  it  may  seem  that  any  change  militates 
against  the  object  of  language  (cf.  Wechssler  L  28),  but  this  is 
true  only  of  the  very  moment  when  the  change  sets  in  while  people 
are  accustomed  to  the  old  sound  (or  the  old  signification),  and 
even  then  the  change  is  only  injurious  provided  it  impedes  under- 
standing or  renders  understanding  less  easy,  which  is  far  from 
always  being  the  case. 

There  is  one  scholar  who  has  asserted  the  existence  of  a  uni- 
versal progressive  tendency  in  languages,  or,  as  he  calls  it,  a 
humanization  of  language,  namely  Baudouin  de  Courtenay  {Ver- 
menschlichung  der  Sprache,  1893).  He  is  chiefly  thinking  of  the 
somid  system,^  and  he  maintains  that  there  is  a  tendency  towards 
eliminating  the  innermost  articulations  and  using  instead  sounds 
that  are  formed  nearer  to  the  teeth  and  lips.  Thus  some  back 
(postpalatal,  velar)  consonants  become  p,  b,  while  others  develop 
into  s  sounds  ;  cf .  Slav  slovo  '  word  '  with  Lat.  clvx),  etc.  Baudouin 
also  mentions  the  frequent  palatalization  of  back  consonants,  as  in 
French  and  Italian  ce,  ci,  ge,  gi,  but  as  this  is  due  to  the  influence 
of  the  following  front  vowel,  it  should  not  perhaps  be  mentioned 
as  a  universal  tendency  of  human  language.  It  is  further  said 
that  throat  sounds,  which  play  such  a  great  role  in  Semitic  languages, 
have  been  discarded  in  most  modern  languages.  But  it  may  be 
objected  that  sometimes  throat  sounds  do  develop  in  modern 
periods,  as  in  the  Danish  '  st0d  '  and  in  English  dialectal  bu'er  for 

^  In  the  realm  of  significations  he  sees  the  '  humanization  '  of  language 
exclusively  in  the  development  of  abstract  terms.  An  important  point 
of  disagreement  between  Baudouin  and  myself  is  in  regard  to  morphology, 
where  he  sees  only  '  oscillations  '  in  historical  times,  in  which  he  is  unable 
to  discover  a  continuous  movement  in  any  definite  direction,  while  I  main- 
tain that  languages  here  manifest  a  definite  progressive  tendency. 


328  PROGRESS   OR   DECAY  ?  [ch.  xvii 

butter,  etc.  A  universal  tendency  of  sounds  to  move  away  from 
the  throat  cannot  be  said  to  be  firml}'  established  ;  but  for  our 
purpose  it  is  more  important  to  sa}''  that  even  were  it  true,  the 
value  of  such  a  tendency  for  the  speaking  community  would  not 
be  great  enough  to  justify  us  in  speaking  of  progress  towards  a 
truly  '  human  '  language  as  opposed  to  the  more  beastlike  language 
of  our  primeval  ancestors.  It  is  true  that  Baudouin  (p.  25)  says 
that  it  is  possible  to  articulate  in  the  front  and  upper  part  with 
less  effort  and  with  greater  precision  than  in  the  interior  and 
lower  parts  of  the  speaking  apparatus,  but  if  this  is  true  with  regard 
to  the  mouth  proper,  it  cannot  be  maintained  with  regard  to  the 
vocal  chords,  where  very  important  effects  may  be  produced  in  the 
most  precise  way  by  infinitely  little  exertion.  Thus  in  no  single 
point  can  I  see  that  Baudouin  de  Courtenay  has  made  out  a  strong 
case  for  his  conception  of  '  humanization  of  language.' 


XVn.— §  7.  Shortenings. 

But  there  is  another  phonetic  tendency  which  is  much  more 
universal  and  infinitely  more  valuable  than  the  one  asserted  by 
Baudouin  de  Courtenay,  namel}?-,  the  tendency  to  shorten  words. 
Words  get  shorter  and  shorter  in  consequence  of  a  great  many 
of  those  changes  that  we  see  constantly  going  on  in  all  languages  : 
vowels  in  weak  syllables  are  pronounced  more  and  more  indis- 
tinctly and  finally  disappear  altogether,  as  when  OE.  Ivfu,  stdnas, 
sende,  through  ME.  luve,  stanes,  sende  with  pronounced  e's,  have 
become  our  modern  monosjilables  love,  stones,  send,  or  when 
Latin  bonum,  homo,  viginti  have  become  Fr.  bon,  on,  vingt,  and 
Lat.  bona,  hominem,  Fr.  bonne,  homme,  where  the  vowel  was  kejDt, 
because  it  was  a  or  protected  by  the  consonant  group,  but  has 
now  also  disappeared  in  normal  pronunciation.  Final  vowels 
have  been  dropped  extensively  in  Danish  and  German  dialects, 
and  so  have  the  w's  and  i's  in  Russian,  which  are  now  kept  in  the 
spelling  merely  as  signs  of  the  quality  of  the  preceding  consonant. 
It  would  be  easy  to  multiply  instances.  Nor  are  the  consonants 
more  stable  ;  the  dropping  of  final  ones  is  seen  most  easily  in 
Modern  French,  because  they  are  retained  in  spelling,  as  in  tout, 
vers,  champ,  chant,  etc.  In  the  two  last  examples  two  con- 
sonants have  disappeared,  the  m  and  n,  however,  leaving  a  trace 
in  the  nasalized  pronunciation  of  the  vowel,  as  also  in  bon,  nom, 
etc.  Final  r  and  I  often  disappear  in  Fr.  words  like  quaire,  simple, 
and  medial  consonants  have  been  dropped  in  such  cases  as  cote 
from  coste,  bete  from  beste,  saiif  [so'f]  from  salvo,  etc.  We  have 
corresponding  omissions  in  English,  where  in  very  old  times  n 
was  dropped  in  such  cases  as  tis,  five,  other,  while  the  German 


§7]  SHORTENINGS  829 

forms  inis,  fiinf,  ander  have  kept  the  old  consonants  ;  in  more 
recent  times  I  was  dropped  in  half,  calm,  etc.,  gh  [x]  in  ligJit,  bought, 
etc.,  and  r  in  the  prevalent  pronunciation  of  varm,  part,  etc.  Initial 
consonants  are  more  firmly  fixed  in  many  languages,  yet  we  see 
them  lost  in  the  E.  combinations  kn,  gn,  ivr,  where  k,  g,  w  used  to 
be  sounded,  e.g.  in  kjioiv,  gnatu,  urong.  Consonant  assimilation 
means  in  most  cases  the  same  thing  as  dropping  of  one  consonant, 
for  no  trace  of  the  consonant  is  left,  at  any  rate  after  the  compen- 
sating lengthening  has  been  given  up,  as  is  often  the  case,  e.g.  in 
E.  cupboard,  blackguard  [kAbod,  blsega'd]. 

So  far  we  have  given  instances  of  what  might  be  called  the  most 
regular  or  constant  types  of  phonetic  change  leading  to  shorter 
forms  ;  but  the  same  result  is  the  natural  outcome  of  a  process 
which  occurs  more  sporadicallj\  This  is  haplology,  by  which  one 
sound  or  one  group  of  sounds  is  jjronounced  once  only  instead  of 
twice,  the  hearer  taking  it  through  a  kind  of  acoustic  delusion  as 
belonging  both  to  what  precedes  and  to  what  follows.  Examples 
are  a  goo{d)  deal,  ivha{t)  to  do,  nex{t)  time,  simp{le)ly,  England 
from  Englalaiul,  eighteen  from  OE.  eahtatiene,  honesty  from 
honestete,  Glou{ce)ster,  Worcester  [wusta],  familiarly  pro{ba)bly, 
vulgarly  lib{ra)ry,  Febr{uar)y.  From  other  languages  may  be 
quoted  Fr.  cont{re)r6le,  ido(lo)ldtre,  Neu{ve)ville,  Lat.  nu{tri)trix, 
8ti{pi)pendium,  It.  qual{che)cosa,  cosa  for  che  cosa,  etc.  (Cf.  my 
LPh  11,  9.) 

The  accumulation  through  centuries  of  such  influences  results 
in  those  instances  of  seemingly  violent  contractions  with 
which  every  student  of  historical  linguistics  is  familiar.  One 
classical  example  has  already  been  mentioned  above,  E.  had, 
corresponding  to  Gothic  habaidedeima ;  other  examples  are  lord, 
with  its  three  or  four  sounds,  which  was  formerly  laverd,  and  in 
Old  English  hldford ;  the  old  Gothonic  form  of  the  same  word 
contained  indubitably  as  manj^^  as  twelve  sounds  ;  Latin  augustum 
has  in  French  through  aoust  become  aout,  pronounced  [au]  or  even 
[u] ;  Latin  ocidum  has  shrunk  into  four  sounds  in  Italian  occhio, 
three  in  Sjpanish  ojo,  and  two  in  Fr.  ceil ;  It,  medesimo,  Sp.  mismo 
and  Fr.  7neme  represent  various  stages  of  the  shrinking  of 
Lat.  metipsimum  ;  cf.  also  Fr.  menage  from  mansion-  +  -aticum 
Primitive  Norse  ne  veit  ek  hvat  '  not  know  I  what  '  has 
become  Dan.  noget  '  something,'  often  pronounced  [no""6]  or 
[no-6]. 

In  all  these  cases  the  shortening  process  has  taken  centuries, 
but  we  have  other  instances  in  which  it  has  come  about  quite 
suddenly,  without  any  intermediate  stages,  namely,  in  those 
stump-words  which  we  have  already  considered  (Ch.  IX  §  7  ;  cf  ^ 
XIV  §  12  on  corresponding  syntactical  shortenings). 


880  PROGRESS   OR  DECAY?  [ch.  xvii 

XVII.— §8.  Objections.    Result. 

There  cannot  tlierefore  be  the  slightest  doubt  that  the  general 
tendency  of  all  languages  is  towards  shorter  and  shorter  forms  : 
the  ancient  languages  of  our  family,  Sanskrit,  Zend,  etc.,  abound 
in  very  long  words  ;  the  further  back  we  go,  the  greater  the  number 
of  sesquipedalia.  It  cannot  justly  be  objected  that  we  see  some- 
times examples  of  phonetic  lengthenings,  as  in  E.  sovnd  from  ME. 
soun,  Fr.  son,  E.  whiht,  amorigst  from  ME.  u-hiles,  amonges  ;  a 
similar  excrescence  of  t  after  s  is  seen  in  G.  obsi,jjabst,  Swcd.  eljest 
and  others  ;  after  n,  t  is  added  in  G.jemand,  nicviand  (two  syllables, 
while  there  is  nothing  added  to  the  trisyllabic  jedermann) — for 
even  if  such  instances  might  be  multiplied,  their  number  and 
importance  is  infinitely  smaller  than  those  in  tlie  opposite  direction. 
(On  the  seeming  insertion  of  d  in  ndr,  see  p.  264,  note).  In  some 
cases  wc  Avitness  a  certain  reaction  against  \^ord  forms  that  are 
felt  to  be  too  short  and  therefore  too  indistinct  (see  Ch.  XV  §  1, 
XX  §  9),  but  on  the  whole  such  instances  are  few  and  far  between  : 
the  prevailing  tendency  is  towards  shorter  forms. 

Another  objection  must  be  dealt  with  here.  It  is  said  that 
it  is  only  the  purely  phonetic  development  that  tends  to  make 
words  shorter,  but  that  in  languages  as  wholes  words  do  not  become 
shorter,  because  non-phonetic  forces  coimteract  the  tendency. 
In  modem  languages  we  thus  have  some  analogical  formations 
which  are  longer  than  the  forms  they  have  supplanted,  as  when 
books  has  one  sound  more  than  OE.  bcc,  or  when  G.  beiregtc  takes  the 
place  of  beicog.  Further,  we  have  in  modern  languages  many  auxili- 
ary words  (prepositions,  modal  verbs)  in  places  where  they  were 
formerly  not  required.  That  this  objection  is  not  valid  if  we 
take  the  whole  of  the  language  into  consideration  may  perhaps 
be  proved  statistically  if  we  compute  the  length  of  the  same  long 
text  in  various  languages  :  the  Gospel  of  St.  Matthew  contains 
in  Greek  about  39,000  syllables,  in  Swedish  about  35,000,  in  German 
33,000,  in  Danish  32,500,  in  English  29,000,  and  in  Chinese  only 
17,000  (the  figures  for  the  Authorized  English  Version  and  for 
Danish  are  my  own  calculation  ;  the  other  figures  I  take  from 
Tegner  SM  51,  Hoops  in  Anglia,  Beiblait  1896,  293,  and  Sturtevant 
LCh  175).  In  comparing  these  figures  it  should  even  be  taken 
into  consideration  that  translations  naturally  tend  to  be  more 
long-winded  and  verbose  than  the  original,  so  that  the  real  gain 
in  shortness  may  be  greater  than  indicated. ^ 

^  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  not,  perhaps,  fair  to  count  the  number  of 
syllables,  as  these  may  vary  very  considerably,  and  some  languages  favour 
syllables  with  heavy  consonant  groups  unkno^vn  in  other  tongues.  The 
most  rational  measure  of  length  wo\ild  be  to  coimt  the  numbers  of  distinct 
(not  sounds,  but)  articulations  of  separate  speech  organs — but  that  task 
is  at  any  rate  beyond  my  powers. 


§8]  OBJECTIONS.     RESULT  881 

Next,  wo  come  to  consider  the  question  whether  the  tendencj' 
towards  shorter  forms  is  a  valuable  asset  in  the  development  of 
languages  or  the  reverse.  The  answer  cannot  be  doubtful.  Take 
the  old  example,  English  had  and  Gothic  Jiabaidedeima :  the 
English  form  is  preferable,  on  the  principle  that  anyone  who  has 
to  choose  between  walking  one  mile  and  four  miles  will,  other 
things  being  equal,  prefer  the  shorter  cut.  It  is  true  that  if  we 
take  words  to  be  self-existing  natural  objects,  Jiabaidedeima  has 
the  air  of  a  giant  and  had  of  a  mere  pigmy  :  this  valuation  lies 
at  the  bottom  of  many  utterances  ev^en  by  recent  linguistic  thinkers, 
as  when  Sweet  (H  10)  speaks  of  the  vanishing  of  sounds  as  "  a 
purely  destructive  change."  But  if  we  adopt  the  anthropocentric 
standard  which  has  been  explained  above,  and  realize  that  what 
we  call  a  word  is  really  and  primarily  the  combined  action  of 
human  muscles  to  produce  an  audible  effeet,  we  see  that  the  shorten- 
ing of  a  form  means  a  diminution  of  effort  and  a  saving  of  time 
in  the  communication  of  our  thoughts.  If,  as  it  is  said,  had  has 
suffered  from  wear  and  tear  in  the  long  course  of  time,  this  means 
that  the  wear  and  tear  of  people  now  using  this  form  in  their  speech 
is  less  than  if  they  were  still  encumbered  with  the  old  giant  habai- 
dedeirna.  Voltaire  was  certainly  very  wide  of  the  mark  when 
he  wrote  :  "  C'est  le  propre  des  barbares  d'abreger  les  mots  " — 
long  and  clumsy  words  are  rather  to  be  considered  as  signs 
of  barbarism,  and  short  and  nimble  ones  as  signs  of  advanced 
culture. 

Though  I  thus  hold  that  the  development  towards  shorter 
forms  of  expression  is  on  the  whole  progressive,  i.e.  beneficial,  I 
should  not  like  to  be  too  dogmatic  on  this  point  and  assert  that 
it  is  always  beneficial :  shortness  may  be  carried  to  excess  and 
thus  cause  obscurity  or  difi&culty  of  understanding.  This  may 
be  seen  in  the  telegraphic  stjde  as  well  as  in  the  literary  style  of 
some  writers  too  anxious  to  avoid  prolixity  (some  of  Pope's  lines 
might  be  quoted  in  illustration  of  the  classical :  brevis  esse  laboro, 
obscurus  fio).  But  in  the  case  of  the  language  of  a  whole  com- 
munity the  danger  certainly  is  very  small  indeed,  for  there  will 
always  be  a  natural  and  wholesome  reaction  against  such  excessive 
shortness.  There  is  another  misunderstanding  I  want  to  guard 
against  when  saying  that  the  shortening  makes  on  the  whole 
for  progress.  It  must  not  be  thought  that  I  lay  undue  stress 
on  this  point,  which  is  after  all  chiefly  concerned  with  a  greater 
or  smaller  amount  of  physical  or  muscular  exertion  :  this  should 
neither  be  underrated  ncr  overrated  ;  but  it  will  be  seen  that 
neither  in  my  former  work  nor  in  this  does  the  consideration  of 
this  point  of  mere  shortness  or  length  take  up  more  than  a  fraction 
of  the  space  allotted  to  the  more  psychical  sides  of  the  question, 


332  PROGRESS   OR  DECAY?  [en.  xvii 

to  which  we  shall  now  turn  our  attention  and  to  which  I  attach 
much  more  importance. 


XVII.— §  9.  Verbal  Forms. 

We  may  here  recur  to  Schleicher's  example,  E.  had  and  Gothic 
habaidedeima.    It  is  not  only  in  regard  to  economy  of  muscular 
exertion  that  the  former  carries  the  day  over  the  latter.     Had 
corresponds  not  only  to  habaidedeima,  but  it  unites  in  one  short 
form  everything  expressed  by  the  Gothic  habaida,  habaides,  habai- 
dedu,  habaideduts,  habaidedum,  habaideduy,  habaidedun,  habaidedjau, 
habaidedeis,    habaidedi,    habaidedeiwa,    habaidedeits,   habaidedeima, 
habaldedeiy,  habaidedeina — separate  forms  for  two  or  three  persons 
in  three  numbers  in  two  distinct  moods  !     It  is  clear,  therefore, 
that  the  English  form  saves  a  considerable  amount  of  brainwork 
to  all  English-speaking  people — not  only  to  children,  who  have 
fewer  forms  to  learn,  but  also  to  adults,  who   have  fewer  forms 
to  choose  between  and  to  keep  distinct  whenever  they  open  their 
mouths   to   speak.     Someone   might,   perhaps,   say   that   on   the 
other  hand  English  people  are  obliged  always  to  join  personal 
pronouns  to  their  verbal  forms  to  indicate  the  person,  and  that 
this  is  a  draAvback  counterbalancing  the  advantage,  so  that  the 
net  result  is  six  of  one  and  half  a  dozen  of  the  other.    This,  how- 
ever, would  be  a  very  suj)erficial  objection.    For,  in  the  fii'st  place, 
the  personal  pronouns  are  the  same  for  all  tenses  and  moods,  but 
the  endings  are  not.    Secondly,  the  possession  of  endings  does 
not  exempt  the  Goths  from  having  separate  personr.l  pronouns  ; 
and  whenever  these  are  used,  as  is  very  often  the  case  in  the  first 
and  second  persons,   those  parts  of  the   verbal   endings   which 
indicate  jDersons  are  superfluous.    They  are  no  less  superfluous 
in  those  extremely  numerous  cases  in  which  the  subject  is  either 
separately  expressed  by  a  noun  or  is  understood  from  the  preceding 
proposition,  thus  in  the  vast  majority  of  the  cases  of  the  third 
person.    If  we  compare  a  few  pages  of  Old  English  prose  with  a 
modern  rendering  we  shall  see  that  in  spite  of  the  reduction  in 
the  latter  of  the  person-indicating  endings,  personal  pronouns  are 
not  required  in  any  great  number  of  sentences  in  which  they  were 
dispensed  with  in  Old  English.    So  that,  altogether,  the  numerous 
endings  of  the  older  languages  must  be  considered  uneconomical. 
If  Gothic,  Latin  and  Greek,  etc.,  biu-den  the  memory  by  the  num- 
ber of  their  flexional  endings,  they  do  so  even  more  b}''  the  many 
irregularities  in  the  formation  of  these   endings.     In  all  the  lan- 
guages of  this  t3'^pe,  anomaly  and  flexion  invariablj^  go  together. 
The  intricacies  of  verbal  flexion  in  Latin  and  Greek  are  well  known, 
and  it  requires  no  small  amount  of  mental  energy  to  master  the 


§9]  VERBAL  FORMS  888 

various  modes  of  forming  the  present  stems  in  Sanskrit — to  take 
onlj'  one  instance.  Many  of  these  irregularities  disappear  in 
course  of  time,  chiefly,  but  not  exchisively,  through  analogical 
formations,  and  though  it  is  true  that  a  certain  number  of  new 
irregularities  may  come  into  existence,  their  number  is  relatively 
small  when  compared  with  those  that  have  been  removed.  Now, 
it  is  not  only  the  forms  themselves  that  are  irregular  in  the  early 
languages,  but  also  their  uses  :  logical  simplicity  prevails  much 
more  in  Modern  English  syntax  than  in  either  Old  Enghsh  or 
Latin  or  Greek.  But  it  is  hardly  necessary  to  point  out  that 
gro\^^ng  regularity  in  a  language  means  a  considerable  gain  to  all 
those  who  learn  it  or  speak  it. 

It  has  been  said,  however,  by  one  of  the  foremost  authorities 
on  the  history  of  English,  that  "  in  spite  of  the  many  changes 
which  this  system  [i.e.  the  complicated  sj^stem  of  strong  verbs] 
has  undergone  in  detail,  it  remains  just  as  intricate  as  it  was  in 
Old  English  "  (Bradley,  The  Making  of  English  51).  It  is  true 
that  the  way  in  which  vowel  change  is  utilized  to  form  tenses 
is  rather  complicated  in  Modern  English  [drink  drank,  give  gave, 
hold  held,  etc.),  but  otherwise  an  enormous  simplification  has  taken 
place.  The  personal  endings  have  been  discarded  with  the  ex- 
ception of  -s  in  the  third  person  singular  of  the  present  (and  the 
obsolete  ending  -est  in  the  second  person,  and  then  this  has  been 
regularized,  thou  sangest  having  taken  the  place  of  y>u  sunge) ;  the 
change  of  vowel  in  ic  sang,  fu  sunge,  we  sungon  in  the  indicative 
and  ic  sunge,  we  sungen  in  the  subjunctive  has  been  given  up, 
and  so  has  the  accompan;ying  change  of  consonant  in  many  cases. 
Thus,  instead  of  the  following  forms,  ceosan,  ceose,  ceosep,  ceosay>, 
ceosen,  cea^,  curon,  cure,  curen,  coren,  we  have  the  following  modern 
ones,  which  are  both  fewer  in  number  and  less  irregular  :  choose, 
chooses,  chose,  chosen — certainly  an  advance  from  a  more  to  a  less 
intricate  system  (cf.  GS  §  178). 

An  extreme,  but  by  no  means  unique  example  of  the  simpli- 
fication foimd  in  modern  languages  is  the  English  cut,  which  can 
serve  both  as  present  and  past  tense,  both  as  singular  and  plural, 
both  in  the  first,  second  and  third  persons,  both  in  the  infinitive, 
in  the  imperative,  in  the  indicative,  in  the  subjunctive,  and  as  a 
past  (or  passive)  participle  ;  compare  with  this  the  old  languages 
with  their  separate  forms  for  different  tenses,  moods,  numbers 
and  persons  ;  and  remember,  moreover,  that  the  identical  form, 
without  any  inconvenience  being  occasioned,  is  also  used  as  a 
noun  (a  cut),  and  you  will  admire  the  economy  of  the  living  tongue. 
A  characteristic  featm-e  of  the  structure  of  languages  in  their 
early  stages  is  that  each  form  contains  in  itself  several  minor 
modifications  whicii  are  often  in  the  later  stages  expressed  separately 


884  PROGRESS   OR   DECAY?  [ch.  xvii 

by  means  of  auxiliary  words.  Such  a  word  as  Latin  cantavisset 
unites  into  one  inseparable  whole  the  equivalents  of  six  ideas  : 
(1)  'sing,'  (2)  pluperfect,  (3)  that  indefinite  modification  of  the 
verbal  idea  which  we  term  subjunctive,  (4)  active,  (5)  third  person, 
and  (6)  singular. 


XVn.— §  10.  Synthesis  and  Analysis. 

Such  a  form,  therefore,  is  much  more  concrete  than  the  forms 
found  in  modern  languages,  of  which  sometimes  two  or  more 
have  to  be  combined  to  express  the  composite  notion  which  was 
rendered  formerly  by  one.  Now,  it  is  one  of  the  consequences 
of  this  change  that  it  has  become  easier  to  express  certain  minute, 
but  by  no  means  unimportant,  shades  of  thought  by  laying  extra 
stress  on  some  particular  element  in  the  speech-group.  Latin 
cantaveram  amalgamates  into  one  indissoluble  whole  what  in  E. 
/  Jiad  sung  is  anal3-8ed  into  three  components,  so  that  you  can  at 
will  accentuate  the  personal  element,  the  tim.e  element  or  the 
action.  Now,  it  is  possible  (who  can  affirm  and  who  can  deny  it  ?) 
that  the  Romans  could,  if  necessary,  make  some  difference  in 
speech  between  cantaveram  (non  saltaveram)  '  I  had  sung,'  and 
cantaverdm  (non  cantabam),  '  I  had  sung  '  ;  but  even  then,  if  it 
was  the  personal  element  which  was  to  be  emphasized,  an  ego 
had  to  be  added.  Even  the  possibility  of  laying  stress  on  the 
temporal  element  broke  down  in  forms  like  scripsi,  minui,  sum, 
audiam,  and  innumerable  others.  It  seems  obvious  that  the 
freedom  of  Latin  in  this  respect  must  have  been  inferior  to  that  of 
English.  Moreover,  in  English,  the  three  elements,  '  I,'  '  had,'  and 
'  sung,'  can  in  certain  cases  be  arranged  in  a  different  order,  and 
other  words  can  be  inserted  between  them  in  order  to  modify 
and  qualify  the  meaning  of  the  sentence.  Note  also  the  concise- 
ness of  such  answers  as  "  Who  had  sung  ?  "  "I  had."  "  "S'^Tiat 
had  you  done  ?  "  "  Sung."  "  I  believe  he  has  enjoyed  himself." 
"I  know  he  has."  And  contrast  the  Latin  "Cantaveram  et 
saltaveram  et  luseram  et  riseram  "  with  the  English  "  I  had  sung 
and  danced  and  played  and  laughed."  What  would  be  the  Latin 
equivalent  of  "  Tom  never  did  and  never  will  beat  me  "  ? 

In  such  cases,  analysis  means  suppleness,  and  sjmthesis  means 
rigidity  ;  in  analytic  languages  you  have  the  power  of  kaleidosco- 
pically  arranging  and  rearranging  the  elements  that  in  sjTithetic 
forms  like  cantaveram  are  in  rigid  connexion  and  lead  a  Siamese- 
twin  sort  of  existence.  The  synthetic  forms  of  Latin  verbs  remind 
one  of  those  languages  all  over  the  world  (North  America,  South 
America,  Hottentot,  etc.)  in  which  such  ideas  as  'father'  or 
'  mother  '  or   '  head  '  or  '  eye  '  carmot  be  expressed  separately, 


§10]  SYNTHESIS   AND  ANALYSIS  885 

but  only  in  connexion  with  an  indication  of  whose  father,  etc., 
one  is  speaking  about  :  in  one  language  the  verbal  idea  (in  the 
finite  moods),  in  the  other  the  nominal  idea,  is  necessarily  fused 
with  the  personal  idea. 


XVII.— §  11.  Verbal  Concord. 

This  formal  inseparability  of  subordinate  elements  is  at  the 
root  of  those  rules  of  concord  wliich  play  such  a  large  role  in  the 
older  languages  of  our  Aryan  family,  but  which  tend  to  disappear 
in  the  more  recent  stages.  By  concord  we  mean  the  fact  that  a 
secondary  word  (adjective  or  verb)  is  made  to  agree  with  the 
primary  word  (substantive  or  subject)  to  which  it  belongs.  Verbal 
concord,  by  which  a  verb  is  governed  in  number  and  person  by 
the  subject,  has  disappeared  from  spoken  Danish,  where,  for 
instance,  the  present  tense  of  the  verb  meaning  '  to  travel  '  is 
uniformly  rejser  in  all  persons  of  both  numbers  ;  while  the  written 
language  till  towards  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  kept  up 
artificially  the  plural  rejse,  although  it  had  been  dead  in  the  spoken 
language  for  some  three  hundred  years.  The  old  flexion  is  an 
article  of  luxury,  as  a  modification  of  the  idea  belonging  properly 
to  the  subject  is  here  transferred  to  the  predicate,  where  it  has 
no  business  ;  for  when  we  say  '  maendene  rejse  '  (die  manner  reisen), 
we  do  not  mean  to  imply  that  they  undertake  several  journeys 
(cf.  Madvig  Kl  28,  Nord.  tsk.  /.  filol.,  n.r.  8.  134). 

By  getting  rid  of  this  superfluity,  Danish  has  got  the  start 
of  the  more  archaic  of  its  Aryan  sister-tongues.  Even  English, 
which  has  in  most  respects  gone  farthest  in  simplifjdng  its  flexional 
system,  lags  here  behind  Danish,  in  that  in  the  present  tense  of 
most  verbs  the  third  person  singular  deviates  fi'om  the  other 
persons  by  ending  in  -s,  and  the  verb  he  preserves  some  other 
traces  of  the  old  concord  system,  not  to  speak  of  the  form  in  -st 
used  with  thou  in  the  language  of  religion  and  poetry.  Small 
and  unimportant  as  these  survivals  may  seem,  still  they  are  in 
some  instances  impediments  to  the  free  and  easy  expression  of 
thought.  In  Danish,  for  instance,  there  is  not  the  slightest  diffi- 
culty in  saying  '  enten  du  eller  jeg  har  uret,'  as  har  is  used  both 
in  the  first  and  second  persons  singular  and  plural.  But  when 
an  Englishman  tries  to  render  the  same  simple  sentiment  he  ia 
baffled  ;  '  either  you  or  I  are  \\Tong  '  is  felt  to  be  incorrect,  and 
so  is  '  either  you  or  I  am  wrong  '  ;  he  might  saj'-  '  either  you  are 
wrong,  or  I,'  but  then  this  manner  of  putting  it,  if  grammatically 
admissible  (with  or  without  the  addition  of  am),  is  somewhat  stiff 
and  awkward  ;  and  there  is  no  perfectly  natiu-al  way  out  of  the 
difficulty,  for  Dean  Alford's  proposal  to  say  '  either  you  or  I  is 


386  PROGRESS   OR  DECAY  [ch.  xvii 

Avrong  '  {The  Queen's  Engl.  155)  is  not  to  be  recommended.  The 
advantage  of  having  verbal  forms  that  are  no  respecters  of  persons 
is  seen  directly  in  such  perfectly  natural  expressions  as  '  either 
you  or  I  must  be  wrong,'  or  '  either  you  or  I  may  be  wrong,' 
or  '  either  you  or  I  began  it ' — and  indirectly  from  the  more  or 
less  artificial  rules  of  Latin  and  Greek  grammars  on  this  point ; 
in  the  following  passages  the  Gordian  knot  is  cut  in  different  waj's  : 

Shakespeare  LLL  v.  2.  346  Nor  God,  nor  I,  deligJits  in  perjur'd 
men  |  id.  As  i.  3.  99  Thou  and  I  am  one  |  Tennyson  Poet.  W.  369 
For  whatsoever  knight  against  us  came  Or  I  or  he  have  easily  over- 
thrown I  Galsworthy  D  30  Am  I  and  all  women  really  what  they 
think  us  ?  |  Shakespeare  H4B  iv.  2.  121  Heauen,  and  not  wee, 
haue  safely  fought  to  day  (Folio,  where  the  Quarto  has  :  God, 
and  not  wee,  hath.  .  .  .) 

The  same  difificulty  often  appears  in  relative  clauses  ;  Alford 
(I.e.  152)  calls  attention  to  the  fact  of  the  Prayer  Book  reading 
"  Thou  art  the  God  that  doeth  wonders,"  whereas  the  Bible  version 
runs  "  Thou  art  the  God  that  doest  wonders."     Compare  also  : 

Shakespeare  As  ni.  5.  55  'Tis  not  her  glasse,  but  you  that 
flatters  her  |  id.  Meas.  ii.  2.  80  It  is  the  law,  not  I,  condemne  your 
brother  |  Carlyle  Fr.  Rev.  38,  There  is  none  but  you  and  I  that  has 
the  people's  interest  at  heart  (translated  from  :  II  n'y  a  que  vous 
et  moi  qui  aimions  le  peuple). 

In  all  such  cases  the  construction  in  Danish  is  as  easy  and 
natm-al  as  it  generally  is  in  the  English  preterit :  "It  was  not  her 
glass,  but  you  that  flattered  her."  The  disadvantage  of  having 
verbal  forms  wliich  enforce  the  indication  of  person  and  number 
is  perhaps  seen  most  strikingly  in  a  French  sentence  like  this 
from  Romain  Rolland's  Jean  Christophe  (7.  221) :  "  Ce  mot,  naturelle- 
ment,  ce  n'est  ni  toi,  ni  moi,  qui  pouvons  le  dire  " — the  verb  agrees 
with  that  which  cannot  be  the  subject  (we)  !  For  what  is  meant 
is  really  :    '  celui  qui  pent  le  dire,  ce  n'est  ni  moi  ni  toi.' 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

PROGRESS 

§  1,  Xominal  Forms.  §  2.  Irregularities  Original.  §  3.  Syntax.  §  4.  Ob- 
jections. §  5.  Word  Order.  §  6.  Gender.  §  7.  Nominal  Concord. 
§  8.  The  English  Genitive.  §  9.  Bantu  Concord.  §  10.  Word  Order 
Again.  §  11.  Compromises.  §  12.  Order  Beneficial  ?  §  13.  Word 
Order  and  Simplification.     §  14.  Summary. 

XVm.— §  1.  Nominal  Forms. 

In  the  flexion  of  substantives  and  adjectives  we  see  phenomena 
corresponding  to  those  we  have  just  been  considering  in  the  verbs. 
The  ancient  languages  of  our  family  have  several  forms  where 
modern  languages  content  themselves  with  fewer  ;  forms  originally 
kept  distinct  are  in  course  of  time  confused,  either  through  a 
phonetic  obliteration  of  differences  in  the  endings  or  through 
analogical  extension  of  the  functions  of  one  form.  The  single 
form  good  is  now  used  where  OE.  used  the  forms  god,  godne,  gode, 
godum,  godes,  godre,  godra,  goda,  godan,  godena  ;  Ital.  uomo  or 
French  hornme  is  used  for  Lat.  homo,  hominem,  homini,  homine 
— nay,  if  we  take  the  spoken  form  into  consideration,  Fr.  [om] 
corresponds  not  only  to  these  Latin  forms,  but  also  to  homines, 
hominibus.  Where  the  modern  language  has  one  or  two  cases, 
in  an  earlier  stage  it  had  three  or  four,  and  still  earlier  seven  or 
eight.  The  difficulties  inherent  in  the  older  system  cannot,  however, 
he  measured  adequately  by  the  number  of  forms  each  word  is 
susceptible  of,  but  are  multiplied  by  the  numerous  differences 
in  the  formation  of  the  same  case  in  different  classes  of  declension ; 
sometimes  we  even  find  anomalies  which  affect  one  word  only. 

Those  who  would  be  inclined  to  maintain  that  new  irregularities 
may  and  do  arise  in  modern  languages  which  make  up  for  what- 
ever earlier  irregularities  have  been  discarded  in  the  course  of 
the  historical  development  will  do  well  to  compile  a  systematic 
list  of  all  the  flexional  forms  of  two  different  stages  of  the  same 
languages,  arranged  exactly  according  to  the  same  principles  : 
this  is  the  only  way  in  which  it  is  possible  really  to  balance  losses 
and  profits  in  a  language.  This  is  what  I  have  done  in  my 
Progress  in  Language  §111  ff.  (reprinted  in  ChE  §9  ff.),  where 
I  have  contrasted  the  case  systems  of  Old  and  Modern  English  : 

22  337 


888  PROGRESS  [ch.  xviii 

the  result  is  that  the  former  system  takes  7  (+  3)  pages,  and  the 
latter  only  2  pages.  Those  pages,  with  their  abbreviations  and 
tabulations,  do  not,  perhaps,  offer  very  entertaining  reading,  but 
I  think  thej'  are  more  illustrative  of  the  real  tendencies  of  language 
than  cither  isolated  examples  or  abstract  reasonings,  and  thej'' 
cannot  fail  to  convince  any  impartial  reader  of  the  enormous  gain 
achieved  through  the  changes  of  the  intervening  nine  hundred 
years  in  the  general  structure  of  the  English  language. 

For  our  general  purposes  it  will  be  -worth  our  while  here  to 
quote  what  Friedrich  Miiller  (Gr  i.  2.  7)  says  about  a  totally 
different  language  :  "  Even  if  the  Hottentot  distinguishes  '  he,' 
'  she  '  and  '  it,'  and  strictly  separates  the  singular  from  the  plural 
number,  yet  by  bis  expressing  '  he  '  and  '  she  '  by  one  sound  in 
the  third  person,  and  by  another  in  the  second,  ho  manifests  that 
he  has  no  percej)tion  at  all  of  our  two  grammatical  categories  of 
gender  and  number,  and  consequently  those  elements  of  his  lan- 
guage that  run  porallel  to  our  signs  of  gender  and  number  must 
be  of  an  entirely  different  nature."  Fr.  Miiller  should  not 
perhaj)s  throw  too  many  stones  at  the  poor  Hottentots,  for  his 
own  native  tongue  is  no  better  than  a  glass  house,  and  we  might 
mth  equal  justice  say,  for  instance  :  "  As  the  Germans  express 
the  plural  number  in  different  manners  in  words  like  gott — gotter, 
hand — hdnde,  vater — vdter,  frau—Jrauen,  etc.,  they  must  be  en- 
tirely lacking  in  the  sense  of  the  category  of  number."  Or  let 
us  take  such  a  language  as  Latin  ;  there  is  nothing  to  show  that 
dominus  bears  the  same  relation  to  do7nini  as  verbum  to  verba, 
urbs  to  urbes,  mensis  to  menses,  cornu  to  cormia,  fnictas  to  fructus, 
etc.  ;  even  in  the  same  M'ord  the  idea  of  plurality  is  not  expressed 
by  the  same  method  for  all  the  cases,  as  is  shown  by  a  com- 
parison of  dominus — domini,  dominam — dominos,  domino— dominis, 
domini — dominorum.  Fr.  Muller  is  no  doubt  wrong  in  saying 
that  such  anomalies  preclude  the  speakers  of  the  language  from 
conceiving  the  notion  of  plurality  ;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  it 
seems  evident  that  a  language  in  which  a  difference  so  simple 
even  to  the  understanding  of  very  young  children  as  that  between 
one  and  more  than  one  can  only  be  expressed  by  a  complicated 
apparatus  must  rank  lower  than  another  language  in  which  this 
difference  has  a  single  expression  for  all  cases  in  Mhich  it  occurs. 
In  this  respect,  too,  Modern  English  stands  higher  than  the  oldest 
English,  Latin  or  Hottentot. 

XVin.— §2.  Irregularities  Original. 

It  was  the  belief  of  the  older  school  of  comparativists  that 
each  case  had  originally  one  single  ending,  which  was  added  to 


§2]  IRREGULARITIES   ORIGINAL  339 

all  nouns  indifferently  (e.g.  -as  for  the  genitive  sg.),  and  that  the 
irregularities  found  in  the  existing  oldest  languages  were  of  later 
growth  ;  the  actually  existing  forms  were  then  derived  from  the 
supposed  unity  form  by  all  kinds  of  phonetic  tricks  and  dodges. 
Now  people  have  begun  to  see  that  the  primeval  language  cannot 
have  been  quite  uniform  and  regular  (see,  for  instance,  Walde 
in  Streitberg's  Qesch.,  2.  194  ff.).  If  we  look  at  facts,  and  not 
at  imagined  or  reconstructed  forms,  we  are  forced  to  acknowledge 
that  in  the  oldest  stages  of  our  family  of  languages  not  only  did 
the  endings  present  the  spectacle  of  a  motley  variety,  but  the 
kernel  of  the  word  was  also  often  subject  to  violent  changes  in 
different  cases,  as  when  it  had  in  different  forms  different  accentua- 
tion and  (or)  different  apophony,  or  as  when  in  some  of  the  most 
frequently  occurring  words  some  cases  were  formed  from  one 
'  stem  '  and  others  from  another,  for  instance,  the  nominative 
from  an  r  stem  and  the  oblique  cases  from  an  n  stem.  In  the 
common  word  for  '  water  '  Greek  has  preserved  both  stems,  nom. 
hudor,  gen.  hudatos,  where  a  stands  for  original  [anj.  Whatever 
the  origin  of  this  change  of  stems,  it  is  a  phenomenon  belonging 
to  the  earlier  stages  of  our  languages,  in  which  we  also  sometimes 
find  an  alteration  between  the  r  stem  in  the  nominative  and  a 
combination  of  the  n  and  the  r  stems  in  the  other  cases,  as  in 
Lat.  jeciir  '  liver,'  jecinoris ;  iter  '  voyage,'  itineris,  which  is 
supposed  to  have  sup]5lnnted  iiinis,  formed  like  feminis  iroia  femur. 
In  the  later  stages  we  always  find  a  simplification,  one  single  form 
running  through  all  cases  ;  tliis  is  either  the  nominative  stem,  as 
in  E.  water,  G.  wasser  (corresponding  to  Gr.  hudor),  or  the  oblique 
case-stem,  as  in  the  Scandinavian  forms,  Old  Norse  vatn,  Swed. 
vatten,  Dan.  vand  (corresponding  to  Gr.  hudat-),  or  finally  a  con- 
taminated form,  as  in  the  name  of  the  Swedish  lake  Vdttern 
(Noreen's  explanation),  or  in  Old  Norse  and  Dan.  skarn  '  dirt,' 
which  has  its  r  from  a  form  like  the  Gr.  skor,  and  its  n  from  a 
form  like  the  Gr.  genitive  shatos  (older  [skantos]).  The  simplification 
is  carried  furthest  in  English,  where  the  identical  form  icater  is 
not  only  used  unchanged  where  in  the  older  languages  difl'erent 
case  forms  would  have  been  used  ('  the  M-ater  is  cold,'  '  the  surface 
of  the  water,'  '  he  fell  into  the  water,'  '  he  swims  in  the  water  '), 
but  also  serves  as  a  verb  ('  did  you  water  the  flowers  ?  '),  and 
as  an  adjunct  as  a  quasi-adjective  ('  a  water  melon,'  '  water 
plants  '). 

In  most  cases  irregularities  have  been  done  away  with  in  the 
waj''  here  indicated,  one  of  the  forms  (or  stems)  being  generalized  ; 
but  in  other  cases  it  may  have  happened,  as  Kretschmer  supposes 
(in  Gercke  and  Nolde,  Einleit.  in  die  Altertumswiss,  I,  501)  that 
irregular  flexion  caused  a  word  to  go  out  of  use  entirely  ;    thus 


340  PROGRESS  [en.  xviii 

in  Modern  Greek  M^^ar  was  supplanted  by  suhoti}  j)?iriar  by  pegadi, 
h&dor  by  nerd,  oils  by  aphti  (=  olion),  kHon  by  skulli  ;  this  possibly 
also  accounts  for  commando  taking  the  place  of  Lat.  jnbeo. 

Some  scholars  maintain  that  the  medieval  languages  were 
more  regular  than  their  modern  representatives  ;  but  if  we  look 
more  closely  into  ^^'hat  they  mean,  we  shall  see  that  they  are  not 
speaking  of  any  regularity  in  the  sense  in  which  the  word  has  here 
been  used — the  only  regularity  which  is  of  importance  to  the 
speakers  of  the  language — but  of  the  regular  correspondence  of 
a  language  with  some  earlier  language  from  which  it  is  derived. 
This  is  particularly  the  case  with  E.  Littrc,  who,  in  his  essays  on 
L'Histoire  de  la  Langiie  Frangaise,  was  full  of  enthusiasm  for  Old 
French,  but  chiefly  for  the  fidelity  with  which  it  had  preserved 
some  features  of  Ijatin.  There  was  thus  the  old  distinction  of 
two  cases  :  nom.  sg.  murs,  ace,  sg.  mur,  and  in  the  plural  inversely 
nom.  mur  and  ace.  murs,  with  its  exact  correspondence  with  Latin 
murus,  murum,  pi.  muri,  muros.  When  this  '  regie  de  Ts '  was 
discovered,  and  the  use  or  omission  of  s,  which  had  hitherto  been 
looked  upon  as  completely  arbitrary  in  Old  French,  v/as  thus 
accounted  for,  scholars  were  apt  to  consider  this  as  an  admirable 
trait  in  the  old  language  which  had  been  lost  in  modern  French, 
and  the  same  view  obtained  with  regard  to  the  case  distinction 
found  in  other  words,  such  as  OFr.  nom.  maire,  ace.  majevr,  or 
nom.  emperere,  ace.  empereur,  corresponding  to  the  Latin  forms 
with  changing  stress,  major,  majdrem,  imjJerdtor,  hnperatdrem, 
etc.  But,  however  interesting  such  things  may  be  to  the  historical 
linguist,  there  is  no  denying  that  to  the  users  of  French  the  modern 
simpler  flexion  is  a  gain  as  compared  with  this  more  complex 
system,  "  Des  sprachhistorikers  freud  ist  des  sprachbrauchers 
leid,"  as  Schuchardt  somewhere  shrewdlj^  remarks. 

XVni.— §  3.  Syntax. 

There  were  also  in  the  old  languages  many  irregularities  in 
the  syntactic  use  of  the  cases,  as  when  some  verbs  governed  the 
genitive  and  others  the  dative,  etc.  Even  if  it  may  be  possible 
in  many  instances  to  account  historically  for  these  uses,  to  the 
speakers  of  the  languages  they  must  have  apjjeared  to  be  mere 
caprices  which  had  to  be  learned  separately  for  each  verb,  and  it 
is  therefore  a  great  advantage  when  they  have  been  gradually 
done  away  with,  as  has  been  the  case,  to  a  great  extent,  even  in 
a  language  like  German,  which  has  retained  many  old  case  forms. 
Thus  verbs  like  entbekren,  vergessen,  bediirfen,  u'ahrnehmen,  which 
formerly  took  the  genitive,  are  now  used  more  and  more  with  the 
^  Thus  also  the  corresponding  Lat.  jecur  by  ficatum,  Fr.  foie. 


§3]  SYKTAX  341 

simple  accusative — a  simplification  ■\\iucli,  among  other  things, 
makes  the  construction  of  sentences  in  the  passive  voice  easier 
and  more  regular. 

The  advantage  of  discarding  the  old  case  distinctions  is  seen 
in  the  ease  Mdth  which  English  and  French  speakers  can  say, 
e.g.,  'with  or  without  my  hat,'  or  'in  and  round  the  church,' 
while  the  correct  German  is  '  mit  meinem  hut  oder  ohnc  densclben  ' 
and  '  in  der  kirche  und  uin  dieselbe '  ;  Wackernagel  writes : 
"  Was  in  ihm  und  um  ihn  und  iiber  ihm  ist."  When  the  preposi- 
tions arc  followed  by  a  single  substantive  without  case  distinction, 
German,  of  course,  has  the  same  simple  construction  as  English, 
e.g.  '  mit  oder  ohne  geld,'  and  sometimes  even  good  ^vl■iters  will 
let  themselves  go  and  write  '  um  und  neben  dem  hochaltare  ' 
(Goethe),  or  '  Hire  tochter  wird  meine  frau  mit  oder  gegen  ihren 
willen  '  (these  examjjles  from  Curme,  German  Grammar  191). 
Cf.  also  :  '  Ich  kann  deinem  bruder  nicht  helfen  und  ihn  unter- 
stUtzen.' 

Many  extremely  convenient  idioms  unknown  in  the  older 
synthetic  languages  have  been  rendered  possible  in  English  through 
the  doing  away  with  the  old  case  distinctions,  such  as  :  Genius, 
demanding  bread,  is  given  a  stone  after  its  possessor's  death  (Shaw) 
(cf .  my  ChE  §  79)  |  he  was  offered,  and  declined,  the  office  of 
poet-laureate  (Gosse)  |  the  lad  was  spoken  highly  of  |  I  love,  and 
am  loved  hy,  my  wife  |  these  laws  my  readers,  whom  I  consider 
as  my  subjects,  are  bound  to  believe  in  and  to  obey  (Fielding)  | 
he  was  heathenishly  inclined  to  believe  in,  or  to  worship,  the 
goddess  Nemesis  (id.)  |  he  rather  rejoiced  in,  than  regretted,  lus 
bruise  (id.)  |  many  a  dim  had  she  talked  to,  and  turned  away 
from  her  father's  door  (ThackerajO  |  their  earthly  abode,  which 
has  seen,  and  seemed  almost  to  S3anpathize  in,  all  their  honour 
(Ruskm). 

XVm.— §4.  Objections. 

Against  my  view  of  the  superiority  of  languages  with  few 
case  distinctions,  Arwid  Johannson,  in  a  very  able  article  (in 
IF  I,  see  especially  p.  247  f.),  has  adduced  a  certain  number  of 
ambiguous  sentences  from  German  : 

Soweit  die  deutsche  zunge  klingt  und  gott  im  himmel 
liedersingt  [is  gott  nominative  or  dative  ?)  |  Seinem  landsmann, 
dem  er  in  seiner  ganzen  bildung  ebensoviel  verdankte,  wie 
Goethe  (nominative  or  dative  ?)  |  Doch  wiirde  die  gesellschaft 
der  Indierin  (genitive  or  dative  ?)  lastig  gewesen  sein  |  Dar- 
in hat  Caballero  wohl  nur  einen  konkurrenten,  die  Eliot, 
welche  freilich  die  spanische  dichterin  nicht  ganz  erreicht  |  Nur 


842  PROGRESS  [ch.  xviii 

Diopeithes  feindet  insgeheim  dich  an  und  die  schwester  des 
Kimon  und  dein  weib  Tclesippa.  (In  the  last  tAvo  sentences 
what  is  the  subject,  and  what  the  object  ?) 

According  to  Johannson,  these  passages  show  the  disadvantages 
of  doing  away  with  formal  distinctions,  for  the  sentences  would 
have  been  clear  if  each  separate  case  had  had  its  distinctive  sign  ; 
"  the  greater  the  wealth  of  forms,  the  more  intelligible  the 
speech."  And  they  show,  he  says,  that  such  ambiguities  will 
occur,  even  where  the  strictest  rules  of  word  order  are  observed. 
I  shall  not  urge  that  this  is  not  exactly  the  case  in  the  last  sen- 
tence if  die  schwester  and  dein  weib  are  to  be  taken  as  accusatives, 
for  then  an  should  have  been  placed  at  the  very  end  of  the  sen- 
tence ;  nor  that,  in  the  last  sentence  but  one,  the  mention  of 
George  Eliot  as  the  '  konkurrcnt '  of  Fernan  Caballero  seems  to 
show  a  partiality  to  the  Spanish  authoress  on  the  part  of  the 
writer  of  the  sentence,  so  that  the  reader  is  prepared  to  take 
welche  as  the  nominative  case  ;  freilich  would  seem  to  point  in  the 
same  direction.  But  these,  of  course,  are  only  trifling  objections  ; 
the  essential  point  is  that  we  must  grant  the  truth  of  Johannson 's 
contention  that  we  have  here  a  flaw  in  the  German  language  ; 
the  defects  of  its  grammatical  system  may  and  do  cause  a  certain 
number  of  ambiguities.  Neither  is  it  difficult  to  find  the  reasons 
of  these  defects  by  considering  the  structure  of  the  language  in 
its  entirety,  and  by  translating  the  sentences  in  question  into  a 
few  other  languages  and  comparing  the  results. 

First,  with  regard  to  the  formal  distinctions  between  cases, 
the  really  weak  point  cannot  be  the  fe-vviiess  of  these  endings, 
for  in  that  case  we  should  expect  the  same  sort  of  ambiguities 
to  be  very  common  in  English  and  Danish,  where  the  formal 
case  distinctions  are  considerably  fewer  than  in  German  ;  but  as 
a  matter  of  fact  such  ambiguities  are  more  frequent  in  German 
than  in  the  other  two  languages.  And,  however  paradoxical  it 
may  seem  at  first  sight,  one  of  the  causes  of  this  is  the  greater 
wealth  of  grammatical  forms  in  German.  Let  us  substitute 
other  words  for  the  ambiguous  ones,  and  we  shall  see  that  the 
amphibology  will  nearly  always  disappear,  because  most  other 
words  will  have  different  forms  in  the  two  cases,  e.g.  : 

Soweit  die  deutsche  zunge  klingt  und  dem  allmdchtigen 
(or,  der  allmdchtige)  lieder  singt  |  Seinem  landsmann,  dem  er 
ebensoviel  verdankte,  wie  dem  grossen  dichter  (or,  der  grosse 
dichter)  |  Doch  wiirde  die  gesellschaft  des  Indiers  (or,  dem 
Indier)  lastig  gewesen  sein  |  Darin  hat  Calderon  wohl  nur 
einen    konkurrcnten,   Shakesijcare,  wekher   freilich  rfen  span- 


§4]  OBJECTIONS  848 

iachen  dichter  nicht  erreicht  (or,  deri  .  .  .  der  spanische  dich- 
ter  .  .  .)  \  Niir  Diopeithes  feindct  dich  insgehoim  an,  und  der 
bruder  des  Kimon  und  sein  freund  T.  (or,  den  bruder  .  .  . 
seinen  freund). 

It  is  this  very  fact  that  countless  sentences  of  this  sort  are 
perfectly  clear  which  leads  to  the  employment  of  similar  construc- 
tions even  where  the  resulting  sentence  is  by  no  means  clear  ; 
but  if  all,  or  most,  words  were  identical  in  the  nominative  and 
the  dative,  like  gott,  or  in  the  dative  and  genitive,  \\kc  der  Indierin, 
constructions  like  those  used  would  be  impossible  to  imagine  in 
a  language  meant  to  be  an  intelligible  vehicle  of  thought.  And 
so  the  ultimate  cause  of  the  ambiguities  is  the  inconsistency'  in  the 
formation  of  the  several  cases.  But  this  inconsistency  is  found 
in  all  the  old  languages  of  the  Arj'an  farail}' :  cases  which  in  one 
gender  or  with  one  class  of  stems  are  kept  perfectly  distinct, 
are  in  others  identical.  I  take  some  examples  from  Latin,  because 
this  is  perhaps  the  best  known  language  of  this  type,  but  Gothic 
or  Old  Slavonic  would  show  inconsistencies  of  the  same  kind. 
Domini  is  genitive  singular  and  nominative  plural  (corresponding 
to,  e.g.,  verbi  and  verba)  ;  verba  is  nominative  and  accusative  pi. 
(corresponding  to  domini  and  dominos)  ;  domino  is  dative  and 
ablative  ;  domince  gen.  and  dative  singular  and  nominative  plural ; 
ie  is  accusative  and  ablative  ;  qui  is  singular  and  plural  ;  qum 
singular  fem.  and  plural  fem.  and  neuter,  etc.  Hence,  while  patres 
filios  amunt  or  patres  filii  amant  are  i)erfectly  clear,  patres  consules 
amant  allows  of  two  interpretations  ;  and  in  how  many  wa3's 
cannot  such  a  proposition  as  Horativs  et  Yirgilius  poetce  Yarii 
amid  erant  be  construed  ?  Menenii  patris  munus  may  mean 
'  the  gift  of  father  Menenius,'  or  '  the  gift  of  Menenius's  father  ' ; 
expers  illius  periculi  either  '  free  from  that  danger '  or  '  free  from 
(sharing)  that  person's  danger '  ;  in  an  infinitive  construction 
with  two  accusatives,  the  only  way  to  know  which  is  the  subject 
and  wliich  the  object  is  to  consider  the  context,  and  that  is  not 
always  decisive,  as  in  the  oracular  response  given  to  the  ^Eacide 
P}Trhus,  as  quoted  by  Cicero  from  Ennius  :  "  Aio  te,  iEacida, 
Romanes  vincere  pos.se."  Such  drawbacks  seem  to  be  inseparable 
from  the  structure  of  the  highly  flexional  Aryan  languages ;  although 
they  are  not  logical  consequences  of  a  wealth  of  forms,  yet  his- 
torically they  cling  to  those  languages  which  have  the  greatest 
number  of  grammatical  endings.  And  as  we  are  here  concerned 
not  with  the  question  how  to  construct  an  artificial  language 
(and  even  there  I  should  not  ad\ase  the  adoption  of  many  case 
distinctions),  but  with  the  valuation  of  natural  languages  as 
actually  existing  in  their  earlier  and  modern  stages,  we  cannot 


QU  PROGRESS  [CH.  xviii 

accept  Johannson's  verdict :    "  The  greater  the  wealth  of  forms, 
the  more  intelligible  the  speech." 


XVm.— §  5.  Word  Order. 

If  the  German  sentences  quoted  above  are  ambiguous,  it  is 
not  only  on  account  of  the  want  of  clearness  in  the  forms  employed, 
but  also  on  account  of  the  German  rules  of  word  order.  One  rule 
places  the  verb  last  in  subordinate  sentences,  and  in  two  of  the 
sentences  there  would  be  no  ambiguity  in  principal  sentences  : 
Die  deutsche  zunge  klingt  und  singt  cjott  im  himmel  licder  ;  or, 
Die  deutsche  zunge  klingt,  und  gott  im  himmel  singt  lieder  |  Sie 
erreicht  freilich  nicht  die  spanische  dichterin  ;  or,  Die  spanische 
dichtcrin  erreicht  sie  freilich  nicht.  In  one  of  the  remaining  sen- 
tences the  ambiguity  is  caused  by  the  rule  that  the  verb  must  be 
placed  immediately  after  an  introductory  subjunct :  if  we  omit 
doch  the  sentence  becomes  clear :  Die  gesellschaft  der  Indierin 
uilrde  liistig  gewesen  sein,  or,  Die  gesellschaft  iiiirde  der  Indierin 
lastig  gewesen  sein.  Here,  again  we  see  the  ill  consequences  of 
inconsistency  of  linguistic  structure  ;  some  of  the  rules  for  word 
position  serve  to  show  grammatical  relations,  but  in  certain  cases 
they  have  to  give  waj'^  to  other  rules,  which  counteract  this  useful 
pm-pose.  If  you  change  the  order  of  words  in  a  German  sentence, 
you  will  often  find  that  the  meaning  is  not  changed,  but  the  result 
will  be  an  unidiomatic  construction  (bad  grammar)  ;  whWe  in 
English  a  transposition  will  often  result  in  perfectly  good  grammar, 
only  the  meaning  will  be  an  entirely  different  one  from  the  original 
sentence.  This  does  not  amount  to  saying  that  the  German  rules 
of  position  are  useless  and  the  English  ones  all  useful,  but  only 
to  sa3dng  that  in  English  word  order  is  utilized  to  express  difference 
of  meaning  to  a  far  greater  extent  than  in  German.  ' 

One  critic  cites  against  me  "  one  example,  which  figures  in 
almost  every  Rhetoric  as  a  violation  of  clearness  :  And  thus  the 
son  the  fervid  sire  address' d"  and  he  adds  :  '"  The  use  of  a  separate 
form  for  nominative  and  accusative  would  clear  up  the  ambiguity 
immediately."  The  retort  is  obvious  :  no  doubt  it  would,  but 
so  would  the  use  of  a  natural  word  order.  Word  order  is  just  as 
much  a  part  of  English  grammar  as  case-endings  are  in  other 
languages  ;  a  violation  of  the  rules  of  word  order  may  cause  the 
same  Avant  of  intelligibility  as  the  use  of  dominum  instead  of 
dominus  would  in  Latin.  And  if  the  example  is  found  in  almost 
every  English  Rhetoric,  I  am  glad  to  say  that  equallj'-  ambiguous 
sentences  are  \evy  rare  indeed  in  other  English  books.  Even  in 
poetry,  where  there  is  such  a  thing  as  poetic  licence,  and  where 
the  exigencies  of  rhj^thm  and  rime,  as  well  as  the  fondness  for 


§5]  WORD    ORDER  345 

archaic  and  out-of-the-way  expressions,  will  often  induce  deviations 
from  the  word  order  of  prose,  real  ambiguity  will  very  seldom 
arise  on  that  account.  It  is  true  that  it  has  been  disputed  which 
is  the  subject  in  Graj^'s  line  : 

Aiid  all  the  air  a  solemn  stillness  holds, 

but  then  it  does  not  matter  much,  for  the  ultimate  understanding 
of  the  line  must  be  exactly  the  same  whether  the  air  holds  stillness 
or  stillness  holds  the  air.  In  ordinary  language  we  may  find 
similar  collocations,  but  it  is  worth  saying  with  some  emphasis 
that  there  can  never  be  any  doubt  as  to  which  is  the  subject  and 
which  the  object.  The  ordinary  word  order  is,  Subject-Verb- 
Object,  and  where  there  is  a  deviation  there  must  always  be  some 
special  reason  for  it.  This  may  be  the  wish,  especially  for  the 
sake  of  some  contrast,  to  throw  into  relief  some  member  of  the 
sentence.  If  this  is  the  subject,  the  purpose  is  achieved  by 
stressing  it,  but  the  word  order  is  not  affected.  But  if  it  is  the 
object,  this  may  be  placed  in  the  very  beginning  of  the  sentence, 
but  in  that  case  English  does  not,  like  German  and  Danish,  require 
inversion  of  the  verb,  and  the  order  consequently  is,  Object-Sub- 
ject-Verb, which  is  perfectly  clear  and  unambiguous.  See,  for 
instance,  Dickens's  sentence:  ''Talent,  Mr.  Micawber  has;  capital, 
Mr.  Micawber  has  not,"  and  the  following  passage  from  a  recent 
novel :  "  Even  Royalty  had  not  quite  their  glow  and  glitter  ; 
Royalty  you  might  see  any  day,  driving,  bowing,  smiling.  The 
Queen  had  a  smile  for  every  one  ;  but  the  Duchess  no  one,  not 
even  Lizzie,  ever  saw."     Thus,  also,  in  Shakespeare's  : 

Things  base  and  vilde,  holding  no  quantity, 

Loue  can  transpose  to  forme  and  dignity  {Mids.  i.  1.  233), 

and  in  Longfellow's  translation  from  Logau  : 

A  blind  man  is  a  poor  man,  and  blind  a  poor  man  is  ; 
For  the  former  seeth  no  man,  and  the  latter  no  man  sees. 

The  reason  for  deviating  from  the  order,  Subject-Verb-Object, 
may  again  be  purely  grammatical :  a  relative  or  an  interrogative 
pronoun  must  be  placed  first  ;  but  here,  too,  English  grammar 
precludes  ambiguity,  as  witness  the  following  sentences  :  This 
picture,  which  surpasses  Mona  Lisa  |  This  picture,  Mhich  Mona 
Lisa  surpasses  |  What  picture  surpasses  Mona  Lisa  ?  |  What 
picture  does  not  IMona  Lisa  surpass  ?  In  German  (dieses  bild, 
welches  die  M.  L.  iibertrifi't,  etc.)  all  four  sentences  would  be 
ambiguous,  in  Danish  the  two  last  would  be  indistinguishable  ; 
but  English  shows  that  a  small  number  of  case  forms  is  not 
incompatible  with  perfect  clearness  and  perspicuity.     If  the  famous 


346  PROGRESS  [ch.  xviii 

oracular  answer  {Henry  VI,  2nd  Part,  i.  4.  33),  "  The  Duke  yet 
liucs,  that  Henry  shall  depose,"  is  ambiguous,  it  is  only  because 
it  is  in  verse,  where  you  expect  inversions  :  in  ordinary  prose  it 
could  be  understood  only  in  one  way,  as  the  word  order  would 
be  reversed  if  Henry  was  meant  as  the  object. 


XVm.— §  6.  Gender. 

Besides  case  distinctions  the  older  Aryan  languages  have  a 
rather  complicated  system  of  gender  distinctions,  which  in  many 
instances  agrees  with,  but  in  many  others  is  totally  independent 
of,  and  even  may  be  completely  at  war  with,  the  natural  distinc- 
tion between  male  beings,  female  beings  and  things  without  sex. 
This  grammatical  gender  is  sometimes  looked  upon  as  something 
valuable  for  a  language  to  possess  ;  thus  Schroeder  {Die  formale 
Unterschcidung  87)  says :  "  The  formal  distinction  of  genders 
is  decidedly  an  enormous  advantage  which  the  Arj^an,  Semitic 
and  Egyptian  languages  have  before  all  other  languages."  Aasen 
{Norsk  Qrammatik  123)  finds  that  the  preservation  of  the  old 
genders  gives  vividness  and  variety  to  a  language  ;  he  therefore, 
in  constructing  his  artificial  Norwegian  '  landsmaal,'  based  it 
on  those  dialects  which  made  a  formal  distinction  between  the 
masculine  and  feminine  article.  But  other  scholars  have  recog- 
nized the  disadvantages  accruing  from  such  distinctions  ;  thus 
Tegner  (SM  50)  regrets  the  fact  that  in  Swedish  it  is  impossible 
to  give  such  a  form  to  the  sentence  '  sin  make  ma  man  ej  svika  ' 
as  to  make  it  clear  that  the  admonition  is  applicable  to  both 
husband  and  wife,  because  make,  '  mate,'  is  masculine,  and  maka 
feminine.  In  Danish,  where  mage  is  common  to  both  sexes,  no 
such  difficulty  arises.  Gabelentz  (Spr  234)  says  :  "  Das  gramma- 
tische  geschlecht  bringt  es  weiter  mit  sich  dass  wir  deutschen  nie 
eine  frauensperson  als  einen  menschen  und  nicht  leicht  einen 
mann  als  eine  person  bezeichnen." 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  German  gender  is  responsible  for  many 
difficulties,  not  only  when  it  is  in  conflict  with  natural  sex,  as  when 
one  may  hesitate  whether  to  use  the  pronoun  es  or  sie  in  reference 
to  a  person  just  mentioned  as  das  mddchen  or  das  iveib,  or  er  or 
sie  in  reference  to  die  schildxcache,  but  also  when  sexless  things 
are  concerned,  and  er  might  be  taken  as  either  referring  to  the 
man  or  to  der  stuhl  or  to  der  wald  just  mentioned,  etc.  In  France, 
grammarians  have  disputed  without  end  as  to  the  propriety  or 
not  of  referring  to  the  (feminine)  word  personnes  by  means  of  the 
pronoun  ils  (see  Nyrop,  Kongriiens  24,  and  Gr.  iii.  §  712)  :  "Les 
personnes  que  vous  attendiez  sont  tons  logis  ici."  As  a  negative 
pronoun  personne  is  now  frankly  masculine  :  '  personne  n'est  mal- 


§  6]  GENDER  847 

heureux.'  With  gens  the  old  feminine  gender  is  still  kept  up  when 
an  adjective  precedes,  as  in  les  bonnes  gens,  thus  also  toutes  les 
bonnes  gens,  but  when  the  adjective  has  no  separate  feminine 
form,  schoolmasters  prefer  to  say  tous  les  honnetes  gens,  and  the 
masculine  generally  prevails  when  the  adjective  is  at  some  distance 
from  ge)is,  as  in  the  old  school -example,  Instruits  par  I' experience, 
toutes  les  vieilles  gens  sont  soupgonneux.  There  is  a  good  deal  of 
artificiality  in  the  strict  rules  of  grammarians  on  this  point,  and 
it  is  therefore  good  that  the  Arrete  ministericl  of  1901  tolerates 
greater  liberty ;  but  conflicts  are  unavoidable,  and  will  rise  quite 
naturally,  in  any  language  that  has  not  arrived  at  the  perfect 
stage  of  complete  genderlessness  (which,  of  course,  is  not  identical 
with  inability  to  express  sex-differences). 

Most  English  pronouns  make  no  distinction  of  sex  :  /,  you, 
we,  they,  who,  each,  somebody,  etc.  Yet,  when  we  hear  that 
Finnic  and  Magj-ar,  and  indeed  the  vast  majority  of  languages 
outside  the  Aryan  and  Semitic  world,  have  no  separate  forms 
for  he  and  she,  our  first  thought  is  one  of  astonishment ;  we  fail 
to  see  how  it  is  possible  to  do  without  this  distinction.  But  if 
we  look  more  closely  we  shall  see  that  it  is  at  times  an  inconvenience 
to  have  to  specify  the  sex  of  the  person  spoken  about.  Coleridge 
{Anima  Poetce  190)  regretted  the  lack  of  a  pronoun  to  refer  to 
the  word  person,  as  it  necessitated  some  stiff  and  strange  construc- 
tion like  '  not  letting  the  person  be  aware  wherein  offence  had 
been  given,'  instead  of  '  wherein  he  or  she  has  offended.'  It 
has  been  said  that  if  a  genderless  pronoun  could  be  substituted 
for  he  in  such  a  proposition  as  this  :  '  It  would  be  interesting  if 
each  of  the  leading  poets  would  tell  us  what  he  considers  his  best 
work,'  ladies  would  be  spared  the  disparaging  implication  that 
the  leading  poets  were  all  men.  Similarly  there  is  something 
incongruous  in  the  following  sentence  found  in  a  German  review 
of  a  book  :  "  Was  Maria  und  Fritz  so  zueinander  zog,  war,  dass 
jeder  von  ihnen  am  anderen  sah,  wie  er  ungliicklich  war."  Any- 
one who  has  written  much  in  Ido  will  have  often  felt  how  convenient 
it  is  to  have  the  common-sex  pronouns  lu  (he  or  she),  singlu,  altru, 
etc.  It  is  interesting  to  see  the  different  ways  out  of  the  difficulty 
resorted  to  in  actual  language.  First  the  cumbrous  use  of  he 
or  she,  as  in  Fielding  TJ  1.  174,  the  reader's  heart  (if  he  or  she 
have  any)  j  i\Iiss  Muloch  H.  2.  128,  each  one  made  his  or  her 
comment.^  Secondly,  the  use  of  he  alone  :  If  anybody  behaves 
in  such  and  such  a  manner,  he   will   be  punished  (cf.  the  wholly 

1  This  ungainly  repetition  is  frequent  in  the  Latin  of  Roman  law,  e.g. 
Digest.  IV.  5.  2,  Qui  qiiceve  .  .  .  capite  diminuti  diminutce  esse  dicentur, 
In  eoa  easve  .  .  .  iudicium  dabo.  |  XLIII.  30,  Qui  quceve,  in  potestate  Lucii 
Titii  eat,  si  is  cave  apud  te  est,  dolov©  male  tuo  factum  est  quominus  apud 


348  PROGRESS  [ch.  xviii 

unobjectionable,  but  not  alwa5's  applicable,  formula  :  Whoever 
behaves  in  such  and  such  a  manner  will  be  punished).  This  use 
of  he  has  been  legalized  by  the  Act  13  and  14  Vict.,  cap.  21.  4  : 
"  That  in  all  acts  words  importing  the  masculine  gender  shall  be 
deemed  and  taken  to  include  females."  Third,  the  sexless  but  plural 
form  they  may  be  used.  If  you  try  to  put  the  phrase,  '  Does 
anybody  prevent  you  1  '  in  another  way,  beginning  with  '  Nobody 
prevents  you,'  and  then  adding  the  interrogatory  formula,  you 
will  perceive  that  '  does  he  '  is  too  definite,  and  '  does  he  or  she  ' 
too  clumsy  ;  and  j^ou  will  therefore  naturally  say  (as  Thackeray 
does,  P  2.  260),  "  Nobody  prevents  you,  do  they  ?  "  In  the  same 
manner  Shakespeare  writes  [Lucr.  125):  "Everybody  to  rest 
themselves  betake."  The  substitution  of  the  plural  for  the 
singular  is  not  wholly  illogical  ;  for  everybody  is  much  the  same 
thing  as  '  all  men,'  and  nobody  is  the  negation  of  '  all  men  '  ;  but  the 
phenomenon  is  extended  to  cases  where  this  explanation  will  not 
hold  good,  as  in  G.  Eliot,  M.  2.  304,  I  shouldn't  like  to  punish  any 
one,  even  if  they'd  done  me  wrong.  (For  many  examples  from 
good  writers  sec  my  MEG.  ii.  5,  56.) 

The  English  interrogative  who  is  not,  like  the  quis  or  quc&  of 
the  Romans,  limited  to  one  sex  and  one  number,  so  that  our 
question  '  Who  did  it  ?  '  to  be  rendered  exactly  in  Latin,  would 
require  a  combination  of  the  four  :  Quis  hoc  fecit  ?  Quce  hoc 
fecit  ?  Qui  hoc  fecerunt  ?  Qiice  hoc  fecertint  ?  or  rather,  the 
abstract  nature  of  who  (and  of  did)  makes  it  possible  to  express 
such  a  question  much  more  indefinitely  in  English  than  in  any 
highly  fiexional  language  ;  and  indefiniteness  in  many  cases  means 
greater  precision,  or  a  closer  correspondence  between  thought  and 
expression. 

XVIII.— §  7.  Nominal  Concord. 

We  have  seen  in  the  case  of  the  verbs  how  widely  diffused  in 
all  the  old  Aryan  languages  is  the  phenomenon  of  Concord.  It 
is  the  same  with  the  nouns.  Here,  as  there,  it  consists  in  secondary 
words  (here  chiefly  adjectives)  being  made  to  agree  with  principal 
words,  but  while  with  the  verbs  the  agreement  was  in  number  and 
person,  here  it  is  in  number,  case  and  gender.  This  is  well  known 
in  Greek  and  Latin  ;  as  examples  from  Gothic  may  here  be  given 
Luk.  1.  72,  gamunan  triggivos  ivtihaizos  seinaizos,  '  to  remember 

te  esset,  ita  eum  eamvc  exhibeas.  |  XI.  3,  Qvii  servurn  scrvam  alicnum  alienam 
recepisse  persuasisseve  quid  ei  dicitur  dolo  malo,  quo  eum  earn  deteriorem 
faceret,  in  eum,  quanta  ea  res  exit,  in  duplum  iudiciiun  dnbo.  I  owe  these 
and  some  other  Latin  examples  to  my  late  teacher.  Dr.  O.  Siesbye.  From 
French,  Nyrop  (Kongruens,  p.  12)  gives  some  corresponding  examples: 
tous  ceux  et  ioutcs  cellea  qui,  ayant  6t6  orphelins,  avaient  eu  une  onfance 
malheureuse  (Philippe),  and  from  Old  French  :  Lors  domia  congie  A  ceua 
et  a  ccles  que  il  avoit  rescous  (Villehardouin). 


§7]  NOMINAL   CONCORD  849 

His  holy  covenant,'  and  1.  15,  allans  dagans  vnsarcms,  'all  our 
days.'  The  EngHsh  translation  shows  how  English  has  discarded 
this  trait,  for  there  is  notliing  in  the  forms  of  {his),  holy,  all  and 
our,  as  in  the  Gothic  forms,  to  indicate  what  substantive  they 
belong  to. 

Wherever  the  same  adjectival  idea  is  to  be  joined  to  two 
substantives,  the  concordless  junction  is  an  obvious  advantage, 
as  seen  from  a  comparison  of  the  English  '  my  wife  and  children  ' 
with  the  French  '  ma  femme  et  mes  enfants,'  or  of  '  the  local  press 
and  committees '   with   '  la  presse  locale  et  les  comites  locaux.' 
Try  to  translate  exactly  into  French  or  Latin  such  a  sentence  as 
this  :    "  What  are  the  present  state  and  wants  of  mankind  ?  " 
(Ruskin).      Cf.  also  the  expression  '  a  verdict  of  wilful  murder 
against  some  person  or  persons  tmknown,'  where  some  and  unknown 
belong  to  the  singular  as  well  as  to  the  plural  forms  ;    Fielding 
wi-ites  {TJ  3.  65)  :    "  Some  particular  chapter,  or  perhaps  chapters, 
may  be  obnoxious.''     Where  an  English  editor  of  a  text  will  write  : 
"  Some  (indifferently  singular  and  j)lural)  word  or  words  wanting 
here,"  a  Dane  will  write  :   "  Et  (sg.)  eller  flere  (pi.)  ord  (indifferent) 
mangier  her."     These  last  examples  may  be  taken  as  proof  that 
it  might  even  in  some  cases  be  advantageous  to  have  forms  in 
the  substantives  that  did  not  show  number  ;  still,  it  must  be 
recognized  that  the  distinction  between  one  and  more  than  one 
rightly  belongs  to  substantival  notions,   but  logically  it  has  as 
little  to  do  with  adjectival  as  with  verbal  notions  (cf.  above,  Ch. 
XVII  §  11).     In  '  black  spots  '  it  is  the  spots,  but  not  the  qualities 
of  black,  that  we  count.     And  in  '  two  black  spots  '  it  is  of  course 
quite  superfluous  to  add  a  dual  or  plural  ending  (as  in  Latin  duo, 
duce)  in  order  to  indicate  once  more  what  the  word  hvo  denotes 
sufficiently,  namely,  that  we  have  not  to   do  with   a  singular. 
Compare,  finally,  E.  to  the  father  and  mother,  Fr.  au  pere  et  a  la 
mere,  G.  zu  deni  vater  und  der  mutter  {zum  voter  und  zur  mutter). 
If  it  is  admitted  that  it  is  an  inconvenience  whenever  you 
want  to  use  an  adjective  to  have  to  put  it  in  the  form  corresponding 
in  case,  number  and  gender  to  its  substantive,  it  may  be  thought 
a  redeeming  feature  of   the  language  which  makes  this  demand 
that,  on  the  other  hand,  it  allows  you  to  place  the  adjective  at  some 
distance  from  the  substantive,  and  yet  the  hearer  or  reader  will 
at  once  connect  the  two  together.     But  here,   as  elsewhere  in 
'  energetics,'    the    question    is    whether    the    advantage    counter- 
balances the  disadvantage  ;  in  other  words,  whether  the  fact  that 
you  are  free  to  place  your  adjective  where  you  will  is  worth  the 
price  you  pay  for  it  in  being  always  saddled  with  the  heavy  apparatus 
of   adjectival   flexions.     Why   should   you   want   to   remove   the 
adjective  from  the  substantive,  which  naturally  must  be  in  your 


850  PROGRESS  [ch.  xviii 

thought  when  you  are  thinking  of  the  adjective  1  There  is  one 
natural  cmploj'ment  of  the  adjective  in  which  it  has  very  often 
to  stand  at  some  distance  from  the  substantive,  namely,  when  it 
is  predicative  ;  but  then  the  example  of  German  shows  the  needless- 
ness  of  concord  in  that  case,  for  while  the  adjunct  adjective  is 
inflected  (ein  guter  mensch,  eine  gute  frau,  ein  gutes  buch,  gvte 
bucher)  the  predicative  is  invariable  like  the  adverb  (der  mensch 
ist  gut,  die  frau  ist  gut,  das  buch  ist  giit,  die  bucher  sind  gut).  It 
is  chiefly  in  poetry  that  a  Latin  adjective  is  placed  far  from  its 
substantive,  as  in  Vergil :  "  Et  bene  apud  memores  vetcris  stat 
gratia  facti  "  (J5n.  IV.  539),  where  the  form  shows  that  veteris 
is  to  be  taken  with  facti  (but  then,  where  does  6ene  belong  ?  it 
might  be  taken  with  memores,  slat  or  facti).  In  Horace's  well- 
known  aphorism  :  "  .^quam  memento  rebus  in  arduis  servare 
mentem,"  the  flexional  form  of  cequam  allows  him  to  place  it  first, 
far  from  mentem,  and  thus  facilitates  for  him  the  task  of  building 
up  a  perfect  metrical  line  ;  but  for  the  reader  it  would  certainly 
be  preferable  to  have  had  cequam  mentem  together  at  once,  instead 
of  having  to  hold  his  attention  in  suspense  for  five  words,  till 
finally  he  comes  upon  a  word  with  which  to  connect  the  adjective. 
There  is  therefore  no  economizing  of  the  energy  of  reader  or  hearer. 
Extreme  examples  may  be  found  in  Icelandic  skaldic  poetry,  in 
which  the  poets,  to  fulfil  the  requirements  of  a  highly  complicated 
metrical  system,  entailing  initial  and  medial  rimes,  very  often 
place  the  words  in  what  logically  must  be  considered  the  worst 
disorder,  thereby  making  their  poem  as  difficult  to  understand 
as  an  intricate  chess-problem  is  to  solve — and  certainly  coming 
short  of  the  highest  poetical  form. 

XVm.— §  8.  The  English  Genitive. 

If  we  compare  a  group  of  Latin  words,  such  as  opera  virorum 
omnium  bonorum  veterum,  v,ith  a  corresponding  group  in  a  few  other 
languages  of  a  less  flexional  t5'-pe ;  OE,  ealra  godra  ealdra  manna 
weorc  ;  Danish  alle  gode  gamle  mcends  vcerker  ;  Modern  English 
all  good  old  men's  works,  we  perceive  by  analyzing  the  ideas  ex- 
pressed by  the  several  words  that  the  Romans  said  really  :  '  work,' 
plural,  nominative  or  accusative  -j-  '  man,'  plural,  masculine, 
genitive  +  '  all,'  plural,  genitive  -f  '  good,'  plural,  masculine, 
genitive  -f  '  old,'  pliu-al,  masculine,  genitive.  Leaving  opera  out 
of  consideration,  we  find  that  plural  number  is  expressed  fom' 
times,  genitive  case  also  fom"  times,  and  masculine  gender  twice  ;  ^ 

^  If  instead  of  omnium  veterutn  I  had  chosen,  for  instance,  muliorum 
antiquorum,  the  meaning  of  mascuUne  gender  would  have  been  rendered 
four  times  :  for  languages,  especially  the  older  ones,  are  not  distinguished 
by  consistency. 


§8]  THE   ENGLISH   GENITIVE  851 

in  Old  English  the  signs  of  number  and  case  are  found  four  times 
each,  while  there  is  no  indication  of  gender  ;  in  Danish  the  plural 
number  is  marked  four  times  and  the  case  once.  And  finally, 
in  Modern  English,  we  find  each  idea  expressed  once  onlj'^ ;  and 
as  nothing  is  lost  in  clearness,  this  method,  as  being  the  easiest  and 
shortest,  must  be  considered  the  best.  Mathematically  the  different 
ways  of  rendering  the  same  thing  might  be  represented  by  the 
formulas  :  anx  +  bnx  +  cnx  =  (an  -f  bn  +  cn)x  =  (a+b+c)nx. 

This  unusual  faculty  of  '  parenthesizing '  causes  Danish, 
and  to  a  still  greater  degree  English,  to  stand  outside  the  definition 
of  the  Aiyan  family  of  languages  given  by  the  earlier  school  of 
linguists,  according  to  wliich  the  Aryan  substantive  and  adjective 
can  never  be  without  a  sign  indicating  case.  Schleicher  (NV  52C) 
says  :  "  The  radical  difference  between  Magyar  and  Indo-Germanic 
(Aryan)  words  is  brought  out  distinctly  by  the  fact  that  the  post- 
positions belonging  to  co-ordinated  nouns  can  be  dispensed  with 
in  all  the  nouns  except  the  last  of  the  series,  e.g.  a  jd  embernek, 
'  dem  guten  menschen  '  (a  for  az,  demonstrative  pronoun,  article  ; 
j6,  good  ;  ember,  man,  -nek,  -nak,  postposition  with  pretty  much 
the  same  meaning  as  the  dative  case),  for  az-nak  (annak)  jd-nak 
ember-nek,  as  if  in  Greek  you  should  say  to  ayad'o  dv^pwrrco.  An 
attributive  adjective  preceding  its  noun  alwaj^s  has  the  form  of 
the  pure  stem,  the  sign  of  plurality  and  the  postposition  indicating 
case  not  being  added  to  it.  Magyars  say,  for  instance,  Hunyady 
Mdtyds  m,agyar  kirdly-nak  (to  the  Hungarian  king  Mathew  Hun- 
yady), -nak  belonging  here  to  all  the  preceding  words.  Nearly 
the  same  thing  takes  place  where  several  words  are  joined  together 
by  means  of  '  and.'  " 

Now,  this  is  an  exact  parallel  to  the  English  group  genitive 
in  cases  like  '  all  good  old  men's  works,'  '  the  King  of  England's 
power,'  '  Beaumont  and  Fletcher's  plays,'  '  somebody  else's 
turn,'  etc.  The  way  in  which  this  group  genitive  has  developed 
in  comparatively  recent  times  may  be  summed  up  as  follows 
(see  the  detailed  exposition  in  my  ChE  ch.  iii.)  :  In  the  oldest 
English  -s  is  a  case-ending,  like  all  others  foimd  in  fiexional  lan- 
guages ;  it  forms  together  with  the  body  of  the  noun  one  indivi- 
sible whole,  in  which  it  is  sometimes  impossible  to  tell  where  the 
kernel  of  the  word  ends  and  the  ending  begins  (compare  endes 
from  e7ide  and  heriges  from  here)  ;  only  some  words  have  this 
ending,  and  in  others  the  genitive  is  indicated  in  other  waj's.  As 
to  syntax,  the  meaning  or  function  of  the  genitive  is  complicated 
and  rather  vague,  and  there  are  no  fixed  rules  for  the  position  of 
the  genitive  in  the  sentence. 

In  coiu-se  of  time  we  witness  a  gradual  development  towards 
greater  regularity  and  precision.    The  partitive,  objective,  descrip- 


352  PROGRESS  [CH.  xviii 

tive  and  some  other  functions  of  the  genitive  become  obsolete ; 
the  genitive  is  invariably  put  immediatelj''  before  the  word  it 
belongs  to  ;  irregular  forms  disaj^pear,  the  s  ending  alone  sur\iving 
as  the  fittest,  so  that  at  last  we  have  one  definite  ending  with  one 
definite  function  and  one  definite  position. 

In  Old  English,  when  several  words  belonging  together  were 
to  be  put  in  the  genitive,  each  of  them  had  to  take  the  genitive 
mark,  though  this  was  often  different  in  different  words,  and  thus 
we  had  combinations  like  anes  reades  mannes,  '  a  red  man's  '  |  y>cere 
godlican  lufe,  '  the  godlike  love's  '  j  ealra  godra  ealdra  manna 
weorc,  etc.  Now  the  s  used  everywhere  is  much  more  independent, 
and  may  be  separated  from  the  principal  word  by  an  adverb  like 
else  or  by  a  prepositional  group  like  of  England,  and  one  s  is 
sufficient  at  the  end  even  of  a  long  group  of  words.  Here,  then,  we 
see  in  the  full  light  of  comparatively  recent  history  a  giving  uj) 
of  the  old  flexion  with  its  inseparability  of  the  constituent  elements 
of  the  word  and  with  its  strictness  of  concord  ;  an  easier  and 
more  regular  s3"stem  is  developed,  in  which  the  ending  leads  a 
more  independent  existence  and  may  be  compared  with  the 
'  agglutinated  '  elements  of  such  a  language  as  Magyar  or  even 
with  the  '  empty  words  '  of  Chinese  grammar.  The  direction  of 
this  development  is  the  direct  ojoposite  of  that  assumed  by 
most  linguists  for  the  development  of  languages  in  prehistoric 
times. 

XVIII.— §  9.  Bantu  Concord. 

One  of  the  most  characteristic  traits  of  the  history  of  English 
is  thus  seen  to  be  the  gradual  getting  rid  of  concord  as  of  some- 
thing superfluous.  Where  concord  is  found  in  our  family  of 
languages,  it  certainly  is  an  heirloom  from  a  jDrimitive  age,  and 
strikes  us  now  as  an  outcome  of  a  tendency  to  be  more  explicit 
than  to  more  advanced  people  seems  strictly  necessary.  It  is 
on  a  par  with  the  '  concord  of  negatives,'  as  we  might  term  the 
emphasizing  of  the  negative  idea  by  seemingly  redundant  repeti- 
tions. In  Old  English  it  was  the  regular  idiom  to  say  :  nnn  man 
?iyste  wan  J-ing,  '  no  man  not-knew  nothing  ' ;  so  it  was  in 
Chaucer's  time :  he  weuere  yet  wo  vileynye  we  sayde  In  all  his 
h-f  unto  wo  manner  wight ;  and  it  survives  in  the  vulgar  speech 
of  our  own  daj's  :  there  was  wiver  wobody  else  gen  (gave)  me 
wothin '  (George  Eliot) ;  whereas  standard  Modern  English  is 
content  with  one  negation  :  no  man  knew  anything,  etc.  That 
concord  is  really  a  primitive  trait  (though  not,  of  course,  found 
equally  distributed  among  all  '  primitive  peoples  ')  will  be  seen 
also  by  a  rapid  glance  at  the  structure  of  the  South  African  group 


§9] 


BANTU   CONCORD 


858 


of  languages  called  Bantu,  for  here  we  find  not  only  repetition  of 
negatives,  but  also  other  phenomena  of  concord  in  specially- 
luxuriant  growth. 

I  take  the  following  examples  chiefly  from  W.  H.  I.  Bleek's 
excellent,  though  unfortunately  unfinished,  Comparative  Grammar, 
though  I  am  well  aware  that  expressions  like  si-m-tanda  (we  love 
him)  "  are  never  used  by  natives  with  this  meaning  without  being 
determined  by  some  other  expression  "  (Torrend,  p.  7).  The 
Zulu  word  for  '  man  '  is  umuntu  ;  every  word  in  the  same  or  a 
following  sentence  ha\ang  anj^  reference  to  that  word  must  begin 
with  something  to  remind  j-ou  of  the  beginning  of  umuntu.  This 
will  be,  according  to  fixed  rules,  either  mu  or  u,  or  w  or  m.  In 
the  following  sentence,  the  meaning  of  which  is  '  our  handsome 
man  (or  woman)  appears,  we  love  him  (or  her),'  these  reminders 
(as  I  shall  term  them)  are  printed  in  italics : 

umuntw      weiu      omwchle  wyabonakala,      simtanda  (1) 
man  ours         handsome  appears,         we  love. 

If,  instead  of  the  singular,  we  take  the  corresponding  plural 
abmtu,  '  men,  people  '  (whence  the  generic  name  of  Bantu),  the 
sentence  looks  quite  different  : 

a6antu  6etu  aftachle  ftayabonakala,  sifeatanda  (2). 

In  the  same  way,  if  we  successively  take  as  our  starting-point 
ilizive,  '  country,'  the  corresponding  plural  amazwe,  '  countries,' 
isizwe,  'nation,'  izizice,  'nations,'  intombi,  'girl,'  izintombi, 
'  girls,'  we  get : 


tZizive 

/etu 

eZ/chle 

Ziyabonakala, 

siZe'tanda 

(5) 

airuvLwe 

etu 

amochle 

ayabonakala, 

siit-'atanda 

(6) 

isizwe 

setu 

estchle 

siyabonakala, 

sisj'tanda 

(7) 

izizwe 

zetu 

ezichle 

ziyabonakala. 

sizz'tanda 

(8) 

iwtombi 

yetu 

enchle 

iyabonakala , 

siyitanda 

(9) 

izivXomhi 

zeiu 

ezmchle 

ziyabonakala. 

sizitanda 

(10) 

(girls) 

our 

handsome 

appear. 

we  love.^ 

In  other  words,  every  substantive  belongs  to  one  of  several 
classes,  of  which  some  have  a  singular  and  others  a  plural  meaning  ; 
each  of  these  classes  has  its  own  prefix,  by  means  of  which  the 
concord  of  the  parts  of  a  sentence  is  indicated.     (An  inhabitant 

^  The  change  of  the  initial  sound  of  the  reminder  belonging  to  the 
adjective  is  explained  through  composition  with  a  '  relative  particle  '  a  ; 
au  becoming  o,  and  ai,  e.  The  numbers  within  parentheses  refer  to  the 
numbers  of  Bleek's  classes.  Similar  sentences  from  Tonga  are  found  in 
Torrend's  Compnr.  Or.  p.  6  f. 

28 


854  PROGRESS  [cH.  xvm 

of  the  country  of  L/ganda  is  called  mwganda,  pi.  ftaganda  or  waganda  ; 
the  language  spoken  there  is  Zwganda.) 

It  will  he  noticed  that  adjectives  such  as  '  handsome '  or 
'  ours  '  take  different  shapes  according  to  the  word  to  which  they 
refer ;  in  the  Zulu  Lord's  Prayer  '  thy  '  is  found  in  the  following 
forms  :  Zako  (referring  to  igama,  '  name,'  for  ilig&ma,,  5),  fcako, 
(w6wkumkani,  '  kingdom,'  14),  yako  (mtando,  '  will,'  9).  So  also 
the  genitive  case  of  the  same  noun  has  a  great  many  different 
forms,  for  the  genitive  relation  is  expressed  by  the  reminder  of 
the  governing  word  +  the  '  relative  particle  '  a  (which  is  com- 
bined with  the  following  sound) ;  take,  for  instance,  inkosi,  '  chief, 
king': 

umuntn  it'enkosi,  '  the  king's  man  '  (1  ;  we  for  w  -\-  a  -\-  i). 

a6antu  6enkosi,  '  the  king's  men  '  (2). 

ilizwe  Zenkosi,  '  the  king's  country  '  (5). 

amazwe  enkosi,  '  the  king's  countries  '  (6). 

isizwe  senkosi,  '  the  king's  nation  '  (7). 

wA;wtanda  kwenkosi,  '  the  king's  love  '  (15). 

Livingstone  says  that  these  apparently  redundant  repetitions 
"  impart  energy  and  perspicuity  to  each  member  of  a  proposition, 
and  prevent  the  possibility  of  a  mistake  as  to  the  antecedent." 
These  prefixes  are  necessary  to  the  Bantu  languages ;  still ,  Bleek 
is  right  as  against  Livingstone  in  speaking  of  the  repetitions  as 
cumbersome,  just  as  the  endings  of  Latin  multorum  virorum 
antiquorum  are  cumbersome,  however  indispensable  they  may 
have  been  to  the  contemporaries  of  Cicero. 

These  African  phenomena  have  been  mentioned  here  chiefly 
to  show  to  what  lengths  concord  may  go  in  the  speech  of  some 
primitive  peoples.  The  prevalent  opinion  is  that  each  of  these 
prefixes  (umu,  aba,  Hi,  etc.)  was  originally  an  independent  word, 
and  that  thus  words  like  umuntu,  ilizwe,  were  at  first  compounds* 
like  E.  steamship,  where  it  would  evidently  be  possible  to  imagine 
a  reference  to  this  word  by  means  of  a  repeated  ship  (our  ship, 
which  ship  is  a  great  ship,  the  ship  appears,  we  love  the  ship) ; 
but  at  any  rate  the  Zulus  extend  this  principle  to  cases  that  would 
be  parallel  to  an  imagined  repetition  of  friendship  by  means  of  the 
same  ship,  or  to  referring  to  steamer  by  means  of  the  ending  er 
(Bleek  107).  Bleek  and  others  have  tried  to  find  out  by  an 
analysis  of  the  words  making  up  the  different  classes  what  may 
have  been  the  original  meaning  of  the  class-prefix,  but  very  often 
the  connecting  tie  is  extremely  loose,  and  in  manj^  cases  it  seems 
that  a  word  might  with  equal  right  have  belonged  to  another 
class  than  the  one  to  which  it  actually  belongs.  The  connexion 
also  frequently  seems  to  be  a  derived  rather  than  an  original  one, 


§9]  BANTU  CONCORD  855 

and  much  in  this  class-division  is  just  as  arbitrary  as  the  reference 
of  Aryan  nouns  to  each  of  the  three  genders.  In  several  of  the 
classes  the  words  have  a  definite  numerical  value,  so  that  they  go 
together  in  pairs  as  corresponding  singular  and  plural  nouns  ;  but 
the  existence  of  a  certain  number  of  exceptions  shows  that  these 
numerical  values  cannot  originally  have  been  associated  with  the 
class  prefixes,  but  must  be  due  to  an  extension  by  analogy 
(Bleek  140  ff.).  The  starting-point  may  have  been  substantives 
standing  to  each  other  in  the  relation  of  '  person  '  to  '  people,' 
'soldier'  to  'army,'  'tree'  to  'forest,'  etc.  The  prefixes  of 
such  words  as  the  latter  of  each  of  these  pairs  will  easily  acquire 
a  certain  sense  of  plurality,  no  matter  what  they  may  have  meant 
originall)',  and  then  they  will  lend  themselves  to  forming  a  kind 
of  plural  in  other  nouns,  being  either  put  instead  of  the  prefix 
belonging  properly  to  the  noun  (amazive,  '  countries,'  6  ;  t7/zwe, 
'country,'  5),  or  placed  before  it  {ma-luto,  'spoons,'  6,  Zwto, 
'spoon,'  11). 

In  some  of  the  languages  "  the  forms  of  some  of  the  prefixes 
have  been  so  stronglj^  contracted  as  almost  to  defy  identification." 
(Bleek  234).  All  the  prefixes  probably  at  first  had  fuller  forms 
than  appear  now.  Bleek  noticed  that  the  ma-  prefix  never,  except 
in  some  degraded  languages,  had  a  corresponding  ma-  as  jDarticle, 
but,  on  the  contrary,  is  followed  in  the  sentence  by  ga-,  ya-,  or 
a-,  and  mu-  (3)  generally  has  a  corresponding  particle  gu-.  Now, 
Sir  Harry  Johnston  [The  Uganda  Protectorate,  1902,  2.  891)  has 
found  that  on  Mount  Eldon  and  in  Kavirondo  there  are  some  very 
archaic  forms  of  Bantu  languages,  in  which  giimu-  and  gama- 
are  the  commonly  used  forms  of  the  mu-  and  ma-  prefixes,  as  well 
as  baba-  and  bnhu-  for  ordinary  ba-,  bu- ;  he  infers  that  the  original 
forms  of  mu-,  wa-  were  ngumu-,  ngama-.  I  am  not  so  sure  that 
he  is  right  when  he  says  that  these  prefixes  were  originally  "  words 
which  had  a  separate  meaning  of  their  own,  either  as  directives 
or  demonstrative  pronouns,  as  indications  of  sex,  weakness,  little- 
ness or  greatness,  and  so  on  " — for,  as  we  shall  see  in  a  subsequent 
chapter,  such  grammatical  instruments  may  have  been  at  first 
inseparable  parts  of  long  words — parts  which  had  no  meaning 
of  their  own — and  have  acquired  some  more  or  less  vague  gram- 
matical meaning  through  being  extended  gradually  to  other  words 
with  which  they  had  originally  nothing  to  do.  The  actual 
irregularity  in  their  distribution  certainly  seems  to  point  in  that 
direction. 

XVm.— §  10.  Word  Order  Again. 

Mention  has  already  been  made  here  and  there  of  word  order 
and  its  relation  to  the  great  question  of  simpUfication  of  gram- 


856  PROGRESS  [ch.  xviii 

matical  structure  ;  but  it  will  be  well  in  this  place  to  return  to  the 
subject  in  a  more  comprehensive  way.  The  theory  of  word  order 
has  long  been  the  Cinderella  of  linguistic  science  :  how  many  even 
of  the  best  and  fullest  grammars  are  wholly,  or  almost  wholly,  silent 
about  it  !  And  yet  it  presents  a  great  many  problems  of  high 
importance  and  of  the  greatest  interest,  not  onl}'  in  those  languages 
in  which  word  order  has  been  extensively  utilized  for  grammatical 
purposes,  such  as  English  and  Chinese,  but  in  other  languages 
as  well. 

In  historical  times  we  see  a  gradual  evolution  of  strict  rules 
for  word  order,  while  our  general  impression  of  the  older  stages 
of  our  languages  is  that  words  were  often  placed  more  or  less  at 
random.  This  is  what  we  should  naturally  expect  from  primitive 
man,  Avhose  thoughts  and  words  are  most  likely  to  have  come  to 
him  rushing  helter-skelter,  in  wild  confusion.  One  cannot,  of 
course,  apply  so  strong  an  expression  to  languages  such  as 
Sanskrit,  Greek  or  Gothic  ;  still,  compared  with  our  modern 
languages,  it  cannot  be  denied  that  there  is  in  them  much  more 
of  what  from  one  point  of  view  is  disorder,  and  from  another 
freedom. 

This  is  especially  the  case  with  regard  to  the  mutual  position 
of  the  subject  of  a  sentence  and  its  verb.  In  the  earliest  times, 
sometimes  one  of  them  comes  first,  and  sometimes  the  other. 
Then  there  is  a  growing  tendencj^  to  place  the  subject  first,  and 
as  this  position  is  found  not  only  in  most  European  languages 
but  also  in  Chinese  and  other  languages  of  far-away,  the  phe- 
nomenon must  be  founded  in  the  very  nature  of  human  thought, 
though  its  non-prevalence  in  most  of  the  older  Aryan  languages 
goes  far  to  show  that  this  particular  order  is  only  natural  to 
developed  human  thought. 

Survivals  of  the  earlier  st^te  of  things  are  found  here  and 
there  ;  thus,  in  German  ballad  style  :  "  Kam  ein  schlanker  bursclf 
gegangen."  Bat  it  is  well  worth  noticing  that  such  an  arrange- 
ment is  generally  avoided,  in  German  as  well  as  in  the  other  modern 
languages  of  Western  Eiu'ope,  and  in  those  cases  where  there  is 
some  reason  for  placing  the  verb  before  the  subject,  the  speaker 
still,  as  it  were,  satisfies  his  grammatical  instinct  by  putting  a 
kind  of  sham  subject  before  the  verb,  as  in  E.  there  comes  a  time 
when  .  .  .,  Dan.  der  kommer  en  tid  da  .  .  .,  G.  €5  kommt  eine 
zeit  wo  .  .  .,  Fr.  il  arrive  un  temps  oh.  .  .  . 

In  Keltic  the  habitual  word  order  placed  the  verb  first,  but 
little  by  little  the  tendency  prevailed  to  introduce  most  sentences 
by  a  periphrasis,  as  in  '  (it)  is  the  man  that  comes,'  and  as  that 
came  to  mean  merel}'  '  the  man  comes,'  the  word  order  Subject- 
Verb  was  thus  brought  about  circuitously. 


§10]  WORD  ORDER  AGAIN  857 

Before  this  particular  word  order,  Subject-Verb,  was  firmly 
established  in  modern  Gothonic  languages,  an  exception  obtained 
wherever  the  sentence  began  with  some  other  word  than  the 
subject ;  this  might  be  some  important  member  of  the  proposition 
that  was  placed  first  lor  the  sake  of  emphasis,  or  it  might  be  some 
unimportant  little  adverb,  but  the  rule  was  that  the  verb  should 
at  any  rate  have  the  second  place,  as  being  felt  to  be  in  some  way 
the  middle  or  central  part  of  the  whole,  and  the  subject  had  then 
to  be  content  to  be  placed  after  the  verb.  This  was  the  rule  in 
Middle  English  and  in  Old  French,  and  it  is  still  strictly  followed 
in  German  and  Danish  :  Gestern  kam  das  schiff  \  Pigen  gav  jeg 
kagen,  ikke  dretigen.  Traces  of  the  practice  are  still  found  in 
English  in  parenthetic  sentences  to  indicate  wjio  is  the  speaker 
('  Oh,  yes,'  said  he),  and  after  a  somewhat  long  subjunct,  if  there 
is  no  object  ('  About  this  time  died  the  gentle  Queen  Elizabeth  '), 
where  this  word  order  is  little  more  than  a  styhstic  trick  to  avoid 
the  abrupt  effect  of  ending  the  sentence  with  an  isolated  verb 
like  died.  Otherwise  the  order  Subject-Verb  is  almost  universal 
in  English. 

XVm.— §11.  Compromises. 

The  inverted  order,  Verb -Subject,  is  used  extensively  in  many 
languages  to  express  questions,  wishes  and  invitations.  But,  as 
already  stated,  this  order  was  not  originally  peculiar  to  such 
sentences.  A  question  was  expressed,  no  matter  how  the  words 
were  arranged,  b}^  pronouncing  the  whole  sentence,  or  the  most 
important  part  of  it,  in  a  peculiar  rising  tone.  This  manner  of 
indicating  questions  is,  of  course,  still  kept  up  in  modern  speech, 
and  is  often  the  only  thing  to  show  that  a  question  is  meant 
('  John  ?  '  I  '  John  is  here  ?  ').  But  although  there  was  thus  a 
natural  manner  of  expressing  questions,  and  although  the  inverted 
word  order  was  used  in  other  sorts  of  sentences  as  well,  yet  in 
course  of  time  there  came  to  be  a  connexion  between  the  two 
things,  so  that  putting  the  verb  before  the  subject  was  felt  as 
implying  a  question.  The  rising  tone  then  came  to  be  less  neces- 
sary, and  is  much  less  marked  in  inverted  sentences  like  '  Is  John 
here  ?  '  than  in  sentences  with  the  usual  word  order  :  '  John 
is  here  ?  ' 

Now,  after  this  method  of  indicating  questions  had  become 
comparatively  fixed,  and  after  the  habit  of  thinking  of  the  subject 
first  had  become  all  but  universal,  these  two  principles  entered 
into  conflict,  the  result  of  which  has  been,  in  English,  Danish 
and  French,  the  establishment  in  some  cases  of  various  kinds  of 
compromise,  in  which  the  interrogatory  word  order  has  formally 


358  PROGRESS  [ch.  xviii 

carried  the  day.  while  really  the  verb,  that  is  to  say  the  verb  wliich 
means  something,  is  placed  after  its  subject.  In  English,  this  is 
attained  by  means  of  the  auxiliary  do  :  instead  of  Shakespeare's 
"  Came  he  not  home  to-night  ?  "  {Ro.  ii.  4.  2)  we  now  say,  "  Did 
he  not  (or.  Didn't  he)  come  home  to-night  ?  "  and  so  in  all  cases 
where  a  similar  arrangement  is  not  already  brought  about  by  the 
presence  of  some  other  auxiliary,  '  Will  he  come  ?  ',  '  Can  he 
come  ?  ',  etc.  Where  we  have  an  interrogatory  pronoun  as  a 
subject,  no  auxiliary  is  required,  because  the  natural  front  position 
of  the  pronoun  maintains  the  order  Subject- Verb  (Who  came  ?  | 
What  hajjpened  ?).  But  if  the  pronoun  is  not  the  subject,  do 
is  required  to  establish  the  balance  between  the  two  principles 
(Who(m)  did  you  see  ?  |  What  does  he  say  ?). 

In  Danish,  the  verb  mon,  used  in  the  old  language  to  indicate 
a  weak  necessity  or  a  vague  futurity,  fulfils  to  a  certain  extent 
the  same  office  as  the  English  do  ;  up  to  the  eighteenth  century 
mon  was  really  an  auxiliary  verb,  followed  by  the  infinitive  :  '  Mon 
han  komme  ?  '  ;  but  now  the  construction  has  changed,  the 
indicative  is  used  with  mon  :  '  Mon  han  kommer  ?  ',  and  mx)n  is 
uo  longer  a  verb,  but  an  interrogatory  adverb,  which  serves  the 
purpose  of  placing  the  subject  before  the  verb,  besides  making 
the  qnestion  more  indefinite  and  vague  :  '  Kommer  han  ?  '  means 
'  Does  he  come  ? '  or  '  Will  he  come  ? '  but  '  Mon  han  kommer  ? ' 
means  '  Does  he  come  (Will  he  come),  do  you  think  ?  ' 

French,  finally,  has  developed  two  distinct  forms  of  compromise 
between  the  conflicting  principles,  for  in  '  Est-ce  que  Pierre  bat 
Jean  ?  '  est-ce  represents  the  interrogatory  and  Pierre  bat  the  usual 
word  order,  and  in  '  Pierre  bat-il  Jean  ?  '  the  real  subject  is  placed 
before  and  the  sham  subject  after  the  verb.  Here  also,  as  in 
Danish,  the  ultimate  result  is  the  creation  of  '  empty  words,'  or 
interrogatory  adverbs  :  est-ce-que  in  every  respect  except  in  spelling 
is  one  word  (note  that  it  does  not  change  with  the  tense  of  the 
main  verb),  and  thus  is  a  sentence  prefix  to  introduce  questions  ; 
and  in  popular  speech  we  find  another  empty  word,  namely  ti 
(see,  among  other  scholars,  G.  Paris,  Melanges  ling.  276).  The 
origin  of  this  ti  is  very  curious.  While  the  t  of  Latin  amat,  etc., 
coming  after  a  vowel,  disappeared  at  a  very  early  period  of  the 
French  language,  and  so  produced  il  aime,  etc.,  the  same  t  was 
kept  in  Old  French  wherever  a  consonant  protected  it,^  and  so 
gave  the  forms  est,  sont,  fait  (from  fact,  for  facit),  font,  chantent, 
etc.  From  est-il,  fait-il,  etc.,  the  t  Avas  then  by  analogy  reintro- 
duced in  aime-t-il,  instead  of  the  earlier  aime  il.  Now,  towards 
the  end  of  the  IMiddle  Ages,  French  final  consonants  were  as  a  rule 

^  This  protecting  consonant  was  dropped  in  pronunciation  at  a  later 
period. 


§11]  COMPROMISES  359 

dropped  in  speech,  except  when  followed  immediately  by  a  word 
beginning  with  a  vowel.  Consequently,  while  /  is  mute  in  sentences 
like  '  Ton  frere  dit  \  Tes  fr^res  disent,'  it  is  sounded  in  the  corre- 
sponding questions,  '  Ton  frdre  dit-il  ?  Tes  fr^res  diaent-iU  ?  ' 
As  the  final  consonants  of  il  and  Us  are  also  generally  dropped, 
even  by  educated  speakers,  the  difference  between  interrogatory 
and  declarative  sentences  in  the  spoken  language  depends  solely 
on  the  addition  of  ti  to  the  verb  :  written  phonetically,  the  pairs 
will  be  : 

[to  frer  di  —  t5  frer  di  ti] 

[te  frcr  diz  —  te  fre"r  di'z  ti]. 

Now,  popular  instinct  seizes  upon  this  ti  as  a  convenient  sign 
of  interrogative  sentences,  and,  forgetting  its  origin,  uses  it  even 
with  a  feminine  subject,  turning  '  Ta  soeur  di(t)  '  into  the  question 
'  Ta  soem-  di  ti  ?  ',  and  in  the  first  person  :  '  Je  di  ti  ?  '  '  Nous 
dison  ti  ?  '  '  Je  vous  fais-ti  tort  ?  '  (Maupassant).  In  novels  this 
is  often  ^vi'itten  as  if  it  were  the  adverb  y  :  C'est-y  pas  vrai  ?  |  Je 
suis  t'y  bete  !  |  C'est-y  vous  le  monsieur  de  I'Academie  qui  va 
avoir  cent  ans  ?  (Daudet).  I  have  dwelt  on  this  point  because, 
besides  showing  the  interest  of  many  problems  of  word  order,  it  also 
throws  some  light  on  the  sometimes  unexpected  ways  by  which 
languages  must  often  travel  to  arrive  at  new  expressions  for  gram- 
matical categories. 

It  was  mentioned  above  that  the  inverted  order,  Verb-Subject, 
is  used  extensively,  not  only  in  questions,  but  also  to  express 
wishes  and  invitations.  Here,  too,  we  find  in  English  compromises 
with  the  usual  order,  Subject-Verb.  For,  apart  from  such  formulas 
as  '  Long  live  the  King  !  '  a  wish  is  generally  expressed  by  means 
of  may,  which  is  placed  first,  while  the  real  verb  comes  after  the 
subject  :  '  Maj'-  she  be  happy  !  ',  and  instead  of  the  old  '  Go  we  !  ' 
we  have  now  '  Let  us  go  !  '  -with  us,  the  virtual  subject,  placed 
before  the  real  verb.  When  a  pronoun  is  wanted  with  an  impera- 
tive, it  used  to  be  placed  after  the  verb,  as  in  Shakespeare  :  '  Stand 
thou  forth  '  and  '  Fear  not  tJiou,'  or  in  the  Bible  :  '  Turn  ye  unto 
him,'  but  now  the  usual  order  has  prevailed  :  '  You  try  !  '  '  You 
take  that  seat,  and  somebody  fetch  a  few  more  chairs  !  '  But  if 
the  auxiliary  do  is  used,  we  have  the  compromise  order  :  '  Don't 
you  stir  !  ' 

XVm.— §  12.  Order  Beneficial  ? 

I  have  here  selected  one  point,  the  place  of  the  subject,  to 
illustrate  the  growing  regularity  in  word  order  ;  but  the  same 
tendency  is  manifested  in  other  fields  as  well  :  the  place  of  the 
object  (or  of  two  objects,  if  we  have  an  indirect  besides  a  direct 


360  PROGRESS  [ch.  xviii 

object),  the  place  of  the  adjunct  adjective,  the  place  of  a  eub- 
orclinate  adverb,  which  by  coming  regularly  before  a  certain 
case  may  become  a  preposition  '  governing  '  that  case,  etc.  It 
cannot  be  denied  that  the  tendency  towards  a  more  regular  word 
order  is  universal,  and  in  accordance  with  the  general  trend  of 
this  inquiry  we  must  next  ask  the  question  :  Is  this  tendency  a 
beneficial  one  ?  Does  the  more  regular  word  order  found  in 
recent  stages  of  our  languages  constitute  a  progress  in  linguistic 
structure  ?  Or  should  it  be  deplored  because  it  hinders  freedom 
of  movement  ? 

In  answering  this  question  we  must  first  of  all  beware  of 
letting  our  judgment  be  run  away  with  by  the  word  '  freedom.' 
Because  freedom  is  desirable  elsewhere,  it  does  not  follow  that 
it  should  be  the  best  thing  in  this  domain  ;  just  as  above  we  did 
not  allow  ourselves  to  be  imposed  on  by  the  phrase  '  wealth  of 
forms,'  so  here  we  must  be  on  our  guard  against  the  word  '  free  '  : 
what  if  we  turned  the  question  in  another  way  :  Which  is  preferable, 
order  or  disorder  ?  It  may  be  true  that,  viewed  exclusively  from 
the  standpoint  of  the  speaker,  freedom  would  seem  to  be  a  great 
advantage,  as  it  is  a  restraint  to  him  to  be  obliged  to  follow  strict 
rules  ;  but  an  orderly  arrangement  is  decidedly  in  the  interest 
of  the  hearer,  as  it  very  considerably  facilitates  his  understanding 
of  what  is  said  ;  it  is  therefore,  though  indirectly,  in  the  interest  of 
the  speaker  too,  because  he  naturally  speaks  for  the  purpose 
of  being  understood.  Besides,  he  is  soon  in  his  turn  to  become 
the  hearer  :  as  no  one  is  exclusively  hearer  or  speaker,  there  can 
be  no  real  conflict  of  interest  between  the  two. 

If  it  be  urged  in  favour  of  a  free  word  order  that  we  owe  a 
certain  regard  to  the  interests  of  poets,  it  must  be  taken  into  con- 
sideration, first,  that  we  cannot  all  of  us  be  poets,  and  that  a 
regard  to  all  those  of  us  who  resemble  Moliere's  M.  Joixrdain  in 
speaking  prose  without  being  aware  of  it  is  perhaps,  after  all,  more 
important  than  a  regard  for  those  very  few  who  are  in  the  enviable 
position  of  writing  readable  verse  ;  secondly,  that  a  statistical 
investigation  would,  no  doubt,  give  as  its  result  that  those  poets 
who  make  the  most  extensive  use  of  inversions  are  not  among  the 
greatest  of  their  craft ;  and,  finally,  that  so  many  methods  are 
found  of  neutralizing  the  restraint  of  word  order,  in  the  shape  of 
particles,  passive  voice,  different  constructions  of  sentences,  etc., 
that  no  artist  in  language  need  despair. 

So  far,  we  have  scarcely  done  more  than  clear  the  ground  before 
answering  our  question.  And  now  we  must  recognize  that  there 
are  some  rules  of  word  order  which  cannot  be  called  beneficial 
in  any  way  ;  they  are  like  certain  rules  of  etiquette,  in  so  far  as 
one  can  see  no  reason  for  their  existence,  and  yet  one  is  obliged  to 


§12]  ORDER   BENEFICIAL?  801 

bow  to  them.  Historians  may,  in  some  cases,  be  able  to  account 
for  their  origin  and  show  that  they  had  a  raison  d'etre  at  some 
remote  period  ;  but  the  circumstances  that  called  them  into  exist- 
ence then  have  passed  away,  and  they  are  now  felt  to  be  restraints 
with  no  concurrent  advantage  to  reconcile  us  to  their  observance. 
Among  rules  of  this  class  we  may  reckon  those  for  placing  the 
French  pronouns  now  before,  and  now  after,  the  verb,  now  with 
the  dative  and  now  with  the  accusative  first,  'elle  me  le  donne  |  elle 
le  lui  donne  |  donnez-Ze  moi  \  ne  me  le  donnez  pas.'  And,  again, 
the  rules  for  placing  the  verb,  object,  etc.,  in  German  subordinate 
clauses  otherwise  than  in  main  sentences.  That  the  latter  rules 
are  defective  and  are  inferior  to  the  English  rules,  which  are  the 
same  for  the  two  kinds  of  sentences,  was  pointed  out  before,  when 
we  examined  Johannson's  German  sentences  (p.  341),  but  here 
we  may  state  that  the  real,  innermost  reason  for  condemning  them 
is  their  inconsistency  :  the  same  rule  does  not  apply  in  all  cases. 
It  seems  possible  to  establish  the  important  principle  that  the 
more  consistent  a  rule  for  word  order  is,  the  more  useful  it  is  in 
the  economy  of  speech,  not  only  as  facilitating  the  understanding 
of  what  is  said,  but  also  as  rendering  possible  certain  thorough- 
going changes  in  linguistic  structure. 


XVm.— §  13.  Word  Order  and  Simplification. 

This,  then,  is  the  conclusion  I  arrive  at,  that  as  simplification 
of  grammatical  structure,  abolition  of  case  distinctions,  and  so 
forth,  alwaj'^s  go  hand  in  hand  with  the  development  of  a  fixed 
word  order,  tliis  cannot  be  accidental,  but  there  must  exist  a 
relation  of  cause  and  effect  between  the  two  phenomena.  Which, 
then,  is  the  prius  or  cause  ?  To  my  mind  undoubtedly  the  fixed 
word  order,  so  that  the  grammatical  simplification  is  the  posterivs 
or  effect.  It  is,  however,  by  no  means  uncommon  to  find  a  half- 
latent  conception  in  people's  minds  that  the  flexional  endings  were 
fij-st  lost  '  by  phonetic  decay,'  or  '  through  the  blind  operation 
of  sound  laws,'  and  that  then  a  fixed  word  order  had  to  step  in 
to  make  up  for  the  loss  of  the  previous  forms  of  expression.  But 
if  this  were  true  we  should  have  to  imagine  an  intervening  period 
in  which  the  mutual  relations  of  words  were  indicated  in  neither 
way  ;  a  period,  in  fact,  in  which  speech  was  unintelligible  and 
consequently  practically  useless.  The  theory  is  therefore  untenable. 
It  follows  that  a  fixed  word  order  must  have  come  in  first  :  it 
would  come  quite  gradually  as  a  natural  consequence  of  greater 
mental  development  and  general  maturity,  when  the  speaker's 
ideas  no  longer  came  into  his  mind  helter-skelter,  but  in  orderly 
sequence.     If   before   the   establishment   of   some   sort   of   fixed 


862  PROGRESS  [ch.  xviii 

word  order  any  tendency  to  slur  certain  final  consonants  or  vowels 
of  grammatical  importance  had  manifested  itself,  it  could  not 
have  become  universal,  as  it  would  have  been  constantly  checked 
by  the  necessity  that  speech  should  be  intelligible,  and  that  there- 
fore those  marks  which  showed  the  relation  of  different  words 
should  not  be  obliterated.  But  when  once  each  word  was  placed 
at  the  exact  spot  where  it  properly  belonged,  then  there  was  no 
longer  anything  to  forbid  the  endings  being  weakened  by  assimila- 
tion, etc.,  or  being  finally  dropped  altogether. 

To  bring  out  my  view  I  have  been  obliged  in  the  preceding 
paragraph  to  use  expressions  that  should  not  be  taken  too  literally  ; 
I  have  spoken  as  if  the  changes  referred  to  were  made  '  in  the 
lump,'  that  is,  as  if  the  word  order  was  first  settled  in  every 
respect,  and  after  that  the  endings  began  to  be  dropped.  The 
real  facts  are,  of  course,  much  more  complicated,  changes  of  one 
kind  being  interwoven  with  changes  of  the  other  in  such  a  w&y  as 
to  render  it  difficult,  if  not  impossible,  in  any  particular  case  to 
discover  which  was  the  prius  and  which  the  posterius.  We  are 
not  able  to  lay  our  finger  on  one  spot  and  say  :  Here  final  m  or 
n  was  dropped,  because  it  was  now  rendered  superfluous  as  a  case- 
sign  on  account  of  the  accusative  being  invariably  placed  after 
the  verb,  or  for  some  other  such  reason.  Nevertheless,  the  essential 
truth  of  my  hypothesis  seems  to  me  unimpeachable.  Look  at 
Latin  final  s.  Cicero  {Oral.  48.  161)  expressly  tells  us,  what  is 
corroborated  by  a  good  many  inscriptions,  that  there  existed  a 
strong  tendency  to  drop  final  s  ;  but  the  tendency  did  not  prevail. 
The  reason  seems  obvious  ;  take  a  page  of  Latin  prose  and  try 
the  effect  of  striking  out  all  final  s's,  and  you  will  find  that  it  will 
be  extremely  difficult  to  determine  the  meaning  of  many  passages  ; 
a  consonant  playing  so  important  a  part  in  the  endings  of  nouns 
and  verbs  could  not  be  left  out  without  loss  in  a  language  possessing 
so  much  freedom  in  regard  to  word  position  as  Latin.  Conse- 
quently it  was  kept,  but  in  course  of  time  word  position  became 
more  and  more  subject  to  laws  ;  and  when,  centm'ies  later,  after 
the  splitting  up  of  Latin  into  the  Romanic  languages,  the  tendency 
to  slur  over  final  s  knocked  once  more  at  the  door,  it  met  no  longer 
with  the  same  resistance  :  final  s  disappeared,  first  in  Italian  and 
Rumanian,  then  in  French,  where  it  was  kept  till  about  the  end 
of  the  Middle  Ages,  and  it  is  now  beginning  to  sound  a  retreat  in 
Spanish  ;  see  on  Andalusian  Fr.  Wulflf,  Un  Chapitre  de  Phonetique 
Andalouse,  1889. 

The  main  line  of  development  in  historical  times  has,  I  take 
it,  been  the  following  :  first,  a  period  in  which  words  were  placed 
somewhere  or  other  according  to  the  fancy  of  the  moment,  but 
many  of  them  provided  with  signs  that  would  show  their  mutual 


§13]        WORD   ORDER  AND  SIMPLIFICATION        868 

relations  ;  next,  a  period  with  retention  of  these  signs,  combined 
with  a  growing  regularity  in  word  order,  and  at  the  same  time  in 
many  connexions  a  more  copious  employment  of  prepositions  ; 
then  an  increasing  indistinctness  and  finally  complete  dropping 
of  the  endings,  word  order  (and  prepositions)  being  now  sufficient 
to  indicate  the  relations  at  fu-st  sho^vn  by  endings  and  similar 
means. 

Viewed  in  this  light,  the  transition  from  freedom  in  word 
position  to  greater  strictness  must  be  considered  a  beneficial 
change,  since  it  has  enabled  the  speakers  to  do  away  with  more 
circumstantial  and  clumsy  linguistic  means.     Schiller  says  : 

Jeden  anderen  mei-ster  erkennt  man  an  dem,  was  er  ausspricht ; 
Was  er  weise  verschweigt,  zeigt  mir  den  meister  des  stils. 

(Every  other  master  is  known  by  what  he  says,  but  the  master 
of  style  by  what  he  is  wisely  silent  on.)  What  style  is  to  the 
individual,  the  general  laws  of  language  are  to  the  nation,  and  we 
must  award  the  palm  to  that  language  which  makes  it  possible 
"  to  be  wisely  silent  "  about  things  which  in  other  languages  have 
to  be  expressed  in  a  troublesome  way,  and  which  have  often  to 
be  expressed  over  and  over  again  {viTorum  omniMm  honorum 
vetenim,  ealra  godra  ealdra  manna).  Could  any  linguistic  expedient 
be  more  worthy  of  the  genus  homo  sapiens  than  using  for  different 
purposes,  with  different  significations,  two  sentences  like  '  John 
beats  Henry  '  and  '  Henry  beats  John,'  or  the  four  Danish  ones, 
'  Jens  slaar  Henrik — Henrik  slaar  Jens — slaar  Jens  Henrik  ? — 
slaar  Henrik  Jens  ?  '  (John  beats  Henry — H.  beats  J. — does  J. 
beat  H.  ? — does  H.  beat  J.  ?),  or  the  Chinese  use  of  6i  in  different 
places  (Ch.  XIX  §  3)  ?  Cannot  this  be  compared  with  the  ingenious 
Arabic  system  of  numeration,  in  which  234  means  something 
entirely  different  from  324,  or  423,  or  432,  and  the  ideas  of  *'  tens  " 
and  "  hundreds  "  are  elegantly  suggested  by  the  order  of  the 
characters,  not,  as  in  the  Roman  system,  ponderously  expressed  ? 
Now,  it  should  not  be  forgotten  that  this  system,  "  where  more 
is  meant  than  meets  the  ear,"  is  not  only  more  convenient,  but 
also  clearer  than  flexions,  as  actually  found  in  existing  languages, 
for  word  order  in  those  languages  which  utilize  it  grammatically 
is  used  much  more  consistently  than  any  endings  have  ever  been 
in  the  old  Aryan  languages.  It  is  not  true,  as  Johannson  would 
have  us  believe,  that  the  dispensing  with  old  flexional  endings  was 
too  dearly  bought,  as  it  brought  about  increasing  possibilities  of 
misunderstandings  ;  for  in  the  evolution  of  languages  the  dis- 
carding of  old  flexions  goes  hand  in  hand  with  the  development 
of  simpler  and  more  regular  expedients  that  are  rather  less  liable 
than    the    old   ones   to   produce    misunderstandings.     Johannson 


864  PROGRESS  [cH.  XVIII 

writes  :  "  In  contrast  to  Jesperscn  I  do  not  consider  that  the 
masterly  expression  is  the  one  which  is  '  A^isely  silent,'  and  conse- 
quently leaves  the  meaning  to  be  partly  guessed  at,  but  the  one 
which  is  able  to  impart  the  meaning  of  the  speaker  or  -wTiter  clearly 
and  perfectly  " — but  here  he  seems  rather  wide  of  the  mark.  For, 
just  as  in  reading  the  arithmetical  symbol  234  we  are  perfectly 
sure  that  two  hundred  and  thirty-four  is  meant,  and  not  three 
hundred  and  forty-two,  so  in  reading  and  hearing  '  The  boy  hates 
the  girl  '  we  cannot  have  the  least  doubt  who  hates  whom.  After 
all,  there  is  less  guesswork  in  the  grammatical  understanding  of 
English  than  of  Latin  ;  cf.  the  examples  given  above,  Ch.  XVIII  §  4, 
p.  343. 

The  tendency  toAvards  a  fixed  word  order  is  therefore  a  pro- 
gressive one,  directly  as  well  as  indirectl3^  The  substitution  of 
word  order  for  flexions  means  a  victory  of  spiritual  over  material 
agencies. 

XVm.— §  14.  Summary. 

We  may  here  sum  up  the  results  of  our  comparison  of  the 
main  features  of  the  grammatical  structures  of  ancient  and 
modern  languages  belonging  to  our  family  of  speech.  We  have 
found  certain  traits  common  to  the  old  stages  and  certain  others 
characteristic  of  recent  ones,  and  have  thus  been  enabled  to 
establish  some  definite  tendencies  of  development  and  to  find 
out  the  general  direction  of  change  ;  and  we  have  sho^oTi  reasons 
for  the  conviction  that  this  development  has  on  the  whole  and 
in  the  main  been  a  beneficial  one,  thus  justifjdng  us  in  speaking 
about '  progress  in  language.'  The  points  in  wliich  the  superiority 
of  the  modern  languages  manifested  itself  were  the  following  : 

(1)  The  forms  are  generally  shorter,  thus  involving  less 
muscular  exertion  and  requiring  less  time  for  their  enunciation. 

(2)  There  are  not  so  many  of  them  to  burden  the  memory. 

(3)  Their  formation  is  much  more  regular. 

(4)  Their  syntactic  use  also  presents  fewer  irregularities. 

(5)  Their  more  analytic  and  abstract  character  facilitates 
expression  by  rendering  possible  a  great  many  combinations  and 
constructions  which  were  formerly  impossible  or  unidiomatic. 

(6)  The  clumsy  repetitions  known  under  the  name  of  concord 
have  become  superfluous. 

(7)  A  clear  and  unambiguous  understanding  is  secured  through 
a  regular  word  order. 

These  several  advantages  have  not  been  won  all  at  once,  and 
languages  differ  very  much  in  the  velocity  with  which  they  have 
been  moving  in  the  direction  indicated  ;  thus  High  German  is 
in  many  respects  behindhand  as  compared  with  Low  German  ; 


§  14]  SUMMARY  305 

European  Dutch  as  compared  with  African  Dutch  ;  Swedish  as 
compared  with  Danish  ;  and  all  of  them  as  compared  with  English  ; 
further,  among  the  Romanic  languages  we  see  considerable  varia- 
tions in  this  respect.  What  is  maintained  is  chiefly  that  there 
is  a  general  tendency  for  languages  to  develop  along  the  lines  here 
indicated,  and  that  this  development  may  truly,  from  the  anthropo- 
centric  point  of  view,  which  is  the  only  justifiable  one,  be  termed 
a  progressive  evolution. 

But  is  tliis  tendency  really  general,  or  even  universal,  in  the 
world  of  languages  ?  It  wll  easily  be  seen  that  my  examples 
have  in  the  main  been  taken  from  comparativelj^  few  languages, 
those  with  which  I  myself  and  presumably  most  of  my  readers 
are  most  familiar,  all  of  them  belonging  to  the  Gothonic  and 
Romanic  branches  of  the  Aryan  famil}'.  Would  the  same  theory 
hold  good  with  regard  to  other  languages  ?  Without  pretending 
to  an  intimate  knowledge  of  the  history  of  many  languages,  I 
yet  dare  assert  that  my  conclusions  are  confirmed  by  all  those 
languages  whose  history  is  accessible  to  us.  Colloquial  Irish  and 
Gaelic  have  in  many  ways  a  simpler  grammatical  structure  than 
the  Oldest  Irish.  Russian  has  got  rid  of  some  of  the  complications 
of  Old  Slavonic,  and  the  same  is  true,  even  in  a  much  higher  degree, 
of  some  of  the  other  Slavonic  languages  ;  thus,  Bulgarian  has 
greatly  simplified  its  nominal  and  Serbian  its  verbal  flexions.  The 
grammar  of  spoken  Modern  Greek  is  much  less  complicated  than 
that  of  the  language  of  Homer  or  of  Demosthenes.  The  structure 
of  Modern  Persian  is  nearly  as  simple  as  English,  though  that  of 
Old  Persian  was  highly  complicated.  In  India  we  witness  a 
constant  simplification  of  grammar  from  Sanskrit  through  Prakrit 
and  Pah  to  the  modern  languages,  Hindi,  Hindostani  (Urdu), 
Bengali,  etc.  Outside  the  Aryan  world  we  see  the  same  movement  : 
Hebrew  is  simpler  and  more  regular  than  AssjTian,  and  spoken 
Arabic  than  the  old  classical  language,  Koptic  than  Old  Egyptian. 
Of  most  of  the  other  languages  we  are  not  in  possession  of  written 
records  from  very  early  times  ;  still,  we  may  afiu-m  that  in  Turkish 
there  has  been  an  evolution,  though  rather  a  slow  one,  of  a  similar 
kind  ;  and,  as  we  shall  see  in  a  later  chapter,  Chinese  seems  to 
have  moved  in  the  same  direction,  though  the  nature  of  its  ^\Titing 
makes  the  task  of  penetrating  into  its  history  a  matter  of  extreme 
difficulty.  A  comparative  study  of  the  numerous  Bantu  languages 
spoken  all  over  South  Africa  justifies  us  in  thinking  that  their 
evolution  has  been  along  the  same  lines  :  in  some  of  them  the 
prefixes  characterizing  various  classes  of  nouns  have  been  reduced 
in  number  and  in  extent  (cf.  above,  §  9).  Of  one  of  them  we  have 
a  grammar  two  hundred  years  old,  by  Brusciotto  b.  Vetralla 
(re-editesd  by  H.  Grattan  Guirmess,  London,  1882).     A  comparison 


860  PROGRESS  [ch.  xviii 

of  his  description  with  the  language  now  spoken  in  the  same 
region  (Mpongwe)  shows  that  the  class  signs  have  dwindled  down 
considerably  and  the  number  of  the  classes  has  been  reduced 
from  16  to  10.  In  short,  though  we  can  only  prove  it  with  regard 
to  a  minority  of  the  multitudinous  languages  spoken  on  the  globe, 
this  minority  embraces  all  the  languages  known  to  us  for  so  long 
a  period  that  we  can  talk  of  their  history,  and  we  may,  therefore, 
confidently  maintain  that  what  may  be  briefly  termed  the 
tendency  towards  grammatical  simplification  is  a  universal  fact 
of  linguistic  history. 

That  this  simplification  is  progressive,  i.e.  beneficial,  was 
overlooked  by  the  older  generation  of  linguistic  thinkers,  because 
they  saw  a  kosmos,  a  beautiful  and  well-arranged  world,  in  the 
old  languages,  and  missed  in  the  modern  ones  several  things  that 
they  had  been  accustomed  to  regard  with  veneration.  To  some 
extent  they  were  right  :  every  language,  when  studied  in  the 
right  spirit,  presents  so  many  beautiful  points  in  its  systematic 
structure  that  it  may  be  called  a  '  kosmos.'  But  it  is  not  in 
ever}'^  way  a  kosmos  ;  like  everything  human,  it  presents  fine 
and  less  fine  features,  and  a  comparative  valuation,  such  as  the 
one  here  attempted,  should  take  both  into  consideration.  There 
is  undoubtedly  an  exquisite  beauty  in  the  old  Greek  language, 
and  the  ancient  Hellenes,  with  their  artistic  temperament,  knew 
how  to  turn  that  beauty  to  the  best  account  in  their  literary 
productions  ;  but  there  is  no  less  beauty  in  many  modern  languages 
— though  its  appraisement  is  a  matter  of  taste,  and  as  such  evades 
scientific  inquiry.  But  the  aesthetic  point  of  view  is  not  the 
decisive  one  :  language  is  of  the  utmost  importance  to  the  whole 
practical  and  spiritual  life  of  mankind,  and  therefore  has  to  be 
estimated  by  such  tests  as  those  applied  above  ;  if  that  is  done, 
we  cannot  be  blind  to  the  fact  that  modern  languages  as  wholes 
are  more  practical  than  ancient  ones,  and  that  the  latter  present 
so  many  more  anomalies  and  irregularities  than  our  present-day 
languages  that  we  may  feel  inclined,  if  not  to  apply  to  them 
Shakespeare's  line,  "Misshapen  chaos  of  well-seeming  forms," 
yet  to  think  that  the  development  has  been  from  something  nearer 
chaos  to  something  nearer  kosmos. 


CHAPTER   XIX 
ORIGIN    OF    GRAMMATICAL    ELEMENTS 

§  1.  The  Old  Theory.  §  2.  Roots.  §  3.  Structure  of  Chinese.  §  4.  History 
of  Chinese.  §  5.  Recent  Investigations.  §  6.  Roots  Again.  §  7.  The 
Agglutination  Theory.  §  8.  Coalescence.  §  9.  Flexional  Endings. 
§  10.  Validity  of  the  Theory.  §  11.  Irregularity  Original.  §  12. 
Coalescence  Theory  dropped.  §  13.  Secretion.  §  14.  Extension  of 
Suffixes.  §  15.  Tainting  of  Suffixes.  §  16.  The  Classifying  Instinct. 
§  17.  Character  of  Suffixes.  §  18.  Brugmann's  Theory  of  Gender. 
§  19.  Final  Considerations. 

XIX.— §  1.  The  Old  Theory. 

What  has  been  given  in  the  last  two  chapters  to  clear  up  the 
problem  "  Decay  or  progress  ?  "  has  been  based,  as  will  readily 
be  noticed,  exclusively  on  easily  controllable  facts  of  linguistic 
history.  So  far,  then,  it  has  been  very  smooth  sailing.  But 
now  we  must  venture  out  into  the  open  sea  of  prehistoric 
speculations.  Our  voyage  will  be  the  safer  if  we  never  lose 
sight  of  land  and  have  a  reliable  compass  tested  in  known 
waters. 

In  our  historical  survey  of  linguistic  science  we  have  already 
seen  that  the  prevalent  theory  concerning  the  prehistoric  develop- 
ment of  our  speech  is  this  :  an  originally  isolating  language, 
consisting  of  nothing  but  formless  roots,  passed  through  an 
agglutinating  stage,  in  which  formal  elements  had  been  de- 
veloped, although  these  and  the  roots  were  mutually  independent, 
to  the  third  and  highest  stage  found  in  flexional  languages, 
in  which  formal  elements  penetrated  the  roots  and  made  insepar- 
able unities  with  them.  We  shall  now  examine  the  basis  of  this 
theory. 

In  the  beginning  was  the  root.  This  is  "  the  result  of  strict 
and  careful  induction  from  the  facts  recorded  in  the  dialects  of 
the  different  members  of  the  family"  (Whitney  L  260).  "The 
firm  foundation  of  the  theory  of  roots  lies  in  its  logical  necessity 
as  an  inference  from  the  doctrine  of  the  historical  growth  of  gram- 
matical apparatus  "  (Whitney  G  200).  "  An  instrumentality  can- 
not but  have  had  rude  and  simple  beginnings,  such  as,  in  language, 
the  so-called  roots  .  .  .  such  imperfect  hints  of  expression  as 
we   call    roots  "    (Whitney,    Views  of  L.  338).     These  are  really 


868    ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS    [ch.  xix 

three  different  statements  :  induction  from  the  facts,  a  logical 
inference  from  the  doctrine  about  grammatical  apparatus  (i.e. 
the  usually  accepted  doctrine,  but  on  what  is  that  built  up  except 
on  the  root  theory  ?),  and  the  a  pri)ri  argument  that  an  '  instru- 
mentality '  must  have  simple  beginnings.  Even  granted  that 
these  three  arguments  given  at  different  times,  each  of  them  in 
turn  as  the  sole  argument,  must  be  taken  as  supplementing  each 
other,  the  three-legged  stool  on  which  the  root  theory  is  thus  made 
to  sit  is  a  very  shaky  one,  for  none  of  the  three  legs  is  very  solid, 
as  we  shall  soon  have  occasion  to  see. 


XIX.— §  2.  Roots. 

In  the  beginning  was  the  root — but  what  was  it  like  ?  Bopp 
took  over  the  conception  of  root  from  the  Indian  grammarians, 
and  like  them  was  convinced  that  roots  were  all  monosyllabic, 
and  that  view  was  accepted  by  his  followers.  These  latter  at 
times  attributed  other  phonetic  qualities  to  these  roots,  e.g.  that 
they  always  had  a  short  vowel  (Curtius  C  22).  I  quote  from  a 
very  recent  treatise  (Wood,  "  Indo-European  Root-formation," 
Journal  of  Germ.  Philol.  1.  291)  :  "I  range  myself  with  those  who 
believe  that  IE.  roots  were  monosyllabic  .  .  .  these  roots  began, 
for  the  most  part,  with  a  vowel.  The  vowels  certainly  were  the 
first  utterances,^  and  though  we  cannot  make  the  beginning  of 
IE.  speech  coeval  with  that  of  human  speech,  we  may  at  least 
assume  that  language,  at  that  time,  was  in  a  very  primitive 
state." 

The  number  of  these  roots  was  not  very  great  (Curtius,  I.e.  ; 
Wood  294).  This  seems  a  natural  enough  conclusion  when  we 
picture  the  earliest  speech  as  the  most  meagre  thing  possible. 

These  few  short  monosj^llabic  roots  were  real  words — this  is 
a  necessary  assumption  if  we  are  to  imagine  a  root  stage  as  a  real* 
language,  and  it  is  often  expressly  stated  ;  Curtius,  for  instance, 
insists  that  roots  are  real  and  independent  w^ords  (C  22,  K  132) ; 
cf.  also  Whitney,  who  says  that  the  root  VAK  "  had  also  once 
an  independent  status,  that  it  was  a  word  "  (L  255).  We  shall 
see  afterwards  that  there  is  another  possible  conception  of  what 
a  '  root '  is  ;  but  let  us  here  grant  that  it  is  a  real  word.  The 
question  whether  a  language  is  possible  which  contains  nothing 
but  such  root  words  was  always  answered  aflfirmatively  by  a 
reference  to  Chinese — and  it  will  therefore  be  well  here  to 
give  a  short  sketch  of  the  chief  structural  features  of  that 
language. 

^  Why  ao  ?  Did  sheep  and  cows  also  begin  with  vowels  only,  adding 
6  ard  m  afterwards  to  make  up  their  bah  and  moo  ? 


§3]  STRUCTURE   OF   CHINESE  309 

XIX.— §  3.  Structure  of  Chinese. 

Each  word  consists  of  one  syllable,  neither  more  nor  less. 
Each  of  these  monosyllables  has  one  of  four  or  five  distinct  musical 
tones  (not  indicated  here).  The  parts  of  speech  are  not  distin- 
guished :  ta  means,  according  to  circumstances,  great,  much, 
magnitude,  enlarge.  Grammatical  relations,  such  as  number, 
person,  t<?nse,  case,  etc.,  are  not  expressed  by  endings  and  similar 
expedients  ;  the  word  in  itself  is  invariable.  If  a  substantive  is 
to  be  taken  as  plural,  this  as  a  rule  must  be  gathered  from  the 
context ;  and  it  is  only  when  there  is  any  danger  of  misunder- 
standing, or  when  the  notion  of  plurality  is  to  be  emphasized, 
that  separate  words  are  added,  e.g.  ki  'some,'  hi  'number.'  The 
most  important  part  of  Chinese  grammar  is  that  dealing  with 
word  order  :  ta  knok  means  '  great  state(s),'  but  kuok  ta  '  the 
state  is  great,'  or,  if  placed  before  some  other  word  which  can 
serve  as  a  verb,  *  the  greatness  (size)  of  the  state  '  ;  tsi  niu  '  boys 
and  girls,'  but  niu  tsi  '  girl  (female  child),'  etc.  Besides  words 
properly  so  called,  or  as  Chinese  grammarians  call  them  '  full 
words,'  there  are  several  '  empty  words  '  serving  for  grammatical 
purposes,  often  in  a  wonderfullj-  clever  and  ingenious  way.  Thus 
ci  has  besides  other  functions  that  of  indicating  a  genitive  relation 
more  distinctly  than  would  be  indicated  by  the  mere  position  of 
the  words  ;  yniii  (people)  lik  (power)  is  of  itself  sufficient  to  signify 
'  the  power  of  the  people,'  but  the  same  notion  is  expressed  more 
explicitly  by  7ni7i  ci  lik.  The  same  expedient  is  used  to  indicate 
different  sorts  of  connexion  :  if  ci  is  placed  after  the  subject  of 
a  sentence  it  makes  it  a  genitive,  thereby  changing  the  sentence 
into  a  kind  of  subordinate  clause  :  wang  poo  min  =  '  the  kmg 
protects  the  people  '  ;  but  if  you  say  wang  ci  pao  min  yeu  (is  like) 
fu  (father)  ci  pao  ts'i,  the  whole  may  be  rendered,  by  means  of  the 
English  verbal  noun,  '  the  king's  protecting  the  people  is  like  the 
father's  protecting  his  child.'  Further,  it  is  possible  to  change 
a  whole  sentence  into  a  genitive  ;  for  instance,  wang  pao  min  ci 
tao  (manner)  k'o  (can)  kien  (see,  be  seen),  '  the  manner  in  which 
the  king  protects  (the  manner  of  the  king's  protecting)  his  people 
is  to  be  seen  '  ;  and  in  j^et  other  positions  ci  can  be  used  to  join 
a  word-group  consisting  of  a  subject  and  verb,  or  of  verb  and 
object,  as  an  adjunct  (attribute)  to  a  noun  ;  we  have  particij)les 
to  express  the  same  modification  of  the  idea :  wang  pao  ci  min 
'  the  people  protected  by  the  king  *  ;  pao  min  ci  wang  '  a  king  pro- 
tecting the  people.'  Observe  here  the  ingenious  method  of  dis- 
tinguishing the  active  and  passive  voices  by  strictly  adhering  to 
the  natural  order  and  placing  the  subject  before  and  the  object 
after  the  verb.     If  we  put  i  before,  and  ku  after,  a  single  word,  it 

24 


870    ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS    [ch.  xix 

means  '  on  account  of,  because  of  '  (cf.  E.  for  .  .  .  's  sake)  ;  if 
we  place  a  whole  sentence  between  these  '  brackets,'  as  we  might 
term  them,  they  are  a  sort  of  conjunction,  and  must  be  translated 
'  because.'  ^ 


XIX.— §  4.  History  o!  Chinese. 

These  few  examples  will  give  some  faint  idea  of  the  Chinese 
language,  and — if  the  whole  older  generation  of  scholars  is  to 
be  trusted — at  the  same  time  of  the  primeval  structure  of  our 
own  language  in  the  root-stage.  But  is  it  absolutely  certain  that 
Chinese  has  retained  its  structure  unchanged  from  the  very  first 
period  ?  By  no  means.  As  early  as  1861,  R.  Lepsius,  from  a 
comparison  of  Chinese  and  Tibetan,  had  derived  the  conviction 
that  "  the  monosyllabic  character  of  Chinese  is  not  original,  but 
is  a  lapse  (!)  from  an  earlier  polysyllabic  structure."  J.  Edkins, 
while  still  believing  that  the  structure  of  Chinese  represents  "  the 
speech  first  used  in  the  Avorld's  grey  morning  "  {The  Evolution  of 
the  Chinese  Language,  1888),  was  one  of  the  foremost  to  examine 
the  evidence  offered  hy  the  language  itself  for  the  determination 
of  its  earlier  pronunciation.  This,  of  course,  is  a  much  more  com- 
plicated problem  in  Chinese  than  in  our  alphabetically  written 
languages  ;  for  a  Chinese  character,  standing  for  a  complete  word, 
may  remain  unchanged  while  the  pronunciation  is  changed  in- 
definitely. But  by  means  of  dialectal  pronunciations  in  om*  own 
day,  of  remarks  in  old  Chinese  dictionaries,  of  transcriptions  of 
Sanskrit  words  made  by  Chinese  Buddhists,  of  rimes  in  ancient 
poetry,  of  phonetic  or  partly  phonetic  elements  in  the  word-char- 
acters, etc.,  is  has  been  possible  to  demonstrate  that  Chmese 
pronunciation  has  changed  considerablj^  and  that  the  direction 
of  change  has  been,  here  as  elsewhere,  towards  shorter  and  easier 
word-forms.     Above  all,  consonant  groups  have  been  simplified.* 

In  1894  I  ventured  to  offer  my  mite  to  these  investigations 
by  suggesting  an  explanation  of  one  phenomenon  of  pronuncia- 
tion in  present-day  Chinese.  I  refer  to  the  change  sometimes 
wrought  in  the  meaning  of  a  word  b}'^  the  adoption  of  a  different 
tone.  Thus  loayig  with  one  tone  is  '  king,'  with  another  '  to  become 
king';  lao  with  one  is  'work,'  with  another  'pay  the  work'; 
tsung  with  one  tone  means  '  follow,'  with  another  '  follower,' 
and  vnih.  a  third  '  footsteps  ' ;  tshi  with  one  tone  is  '  wife,'  with 
another  '  marry  '  ;  had  is  'good,'  and  had  is  '  love.'  Nay,  meanings 
so  different  as  '  acquire  '  and  '  give  '  {sheu)  or  '  buy  '  and  '  sell ' 
(mai)  are  only  distinguished  by  the  tones.     Edkins  and  V.  Henry 

^  The  examples  taken  from  Gabelentz's  Orammar  and  an  article  in 
Teclimor's  Intermit.  Zeitschrift  I. 


§4]  HISTORY   OF  CHINESE  871 

{Le  Musion,  Louvain,  1882,  i.  435)  have  attempted  to  explain  this 
from  gestures  ;  but  this  is  palpably  wrong.  In  the  Danish  dialect 
spoken  in  Sundeved,  in  southernmost  Jutland,  two  tones  are  dis- 
tinguished, one  high  and  one  low  (see  articles  by  N.  Andersen 
and  m3''self  in  Dania,  vol.  iv.).  Now,  these  tones  often  serve  to 
keep  words  or  forms  of  words  apart  that  but  for  the  tone,  exactly 
as  in  Cliinese,  would  be  perfect  homophones.  Thus  na  with  the 
low  tone  is  '  fool,'  but  with  the  high  tone  it  is  either  the  plural 
'  fools  '  or  else  a  verb  '  to  cheat,  hoax  ' ;  ri  '  ride  '  is  imperative 
or  infinitive  according  to  the  tone  in  which  it  is  uttered  ;  jem  in 
the  low  tone  is  '  home  '  and  in  the  high  '  at  home  ' ;  and  so  on 
in  a  great  many  words.  There  is  no  need,  however,  in  this  language 
to  resort  to  gestures  to  explain  these  tonic  differences  :  the  low 
tone  is  found  in  words  originally  monosyllabic  (compare  standard 
Danish  nar,  rid,  hjeni),  and  the  high  tone  in  words  originally 
dissyllabic  (compare  Danish  narre,  ride,  hjemme).  The  tones  belong- 
ing formerly  to  two  syllables  are  now  condensed  on  one  syllable. 
Although,  of  course,  Chinese  tones  cannot  in  every  respect  be 
paralleled  with  Scandinavian  ones,  we  may  provisionally  con- 
jecture that  the  above-mentioned  pairs  of  Chinese  words  were 
formerly  distinguished  by  derivative  syllables  or  flexional  endings 
(see  below,  p.  373)  which  have  now  disappeared  without  leaving 
any  traces  behind  them  except  in  the  tonas.  This  hypothesis 
is  perhaps  rendered  more  probable  by  what  seems  to  be  an  estab- 
lished fact — that  one  of  the  tones  has  arisen  through  the  dropping 
of  final  stopped  consonants  {p,  t,  k). 

However  this  may  be,  the  death-blow  was  given  to  the  dogma 
of  the  primitiveness  of  Chinese  speech  by  Ernst  Kuhn's  lecture 
Ueher  Herkitnjt  und  Sprache  der  Trausgangetischen  Volker  (Munich, 
1883).  He  compares  Chinese  with  the  surrounding  languages  of 
Tibet,  Burmah  and  Siam,  which  are  certainly  related  to  Chinese 
and  have  essentially  the  same  structure  ;  they  are  isolating,  have 
no  flexion,  and  word  order  is  their  chief  grammatical  instrument. 
But  the  laws  of  word  order  prove  to  be  different  in  these  several 
languages,  and  Kuhn  draws  the  incontrovertible  conclusion  that 
it  is  impossible  that  any  one  of  these  laws  of  word  position  should 
have  been  the  original  one ;  for  that  would  imply  that  the  other 
nations  have  changed  it  without  the  least  reason  and  at  a  risk 
of  terrible  confusion.  The  only  likely  explanation  is  that  these 
differences  are  the  outcome  of  a  former  state  of  greater  freedom. 
But  if  the  ancestral  speech  had  a  free  word  order,  to  be  at  all 
intelligible  it  must  have  been  possessed  of  other  grammatical 
appliances  than  are  now  found  in  the  derived  tongues  ;  in  other 
words,  it  must  have  indicated  the  relations  of  words  to  each  other 
by  something  like  our  derivatives  or  flexions. 


372     ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS  [en.  xix 

To  the  result  thus  established  by  Kuhn,  that  Chinese  cannot 
have  had  a  fixed  word  order  from  the  beginning,  wo  seem  also 
to  be  led  if  we  ask  the  question,  Is  primitive  man  likely  to  have 
arranged  his  words  in  this  way  ?  A  Chinese  sentence,  according 
to  Gabelentz  (Spr  426),  is  arranged  with  the  same  logical  pre- 
cision as  the  direction  on  an  English  envelope,  where  the  most 
specific  word  is  placed  first,  and  each  subsequent  word  is  like  a 
box  comprising  all  that  precedes — only  that  a  Chinaman  would 
reverse  the  order,  beginning  with  the  most  general  word  and  then 
in  due  order  specializing.  Now,  is  it  probable  that  primitive  man, 
that  xmkempt,  savage  being,  who  did  not  yet  deserve  the  proud 
generic  name  of  honio  sapiens,  but  would  be  better  termed,  if  not 
fio7no  insipiens,  at  best  ho7no  incipiens — is  it  probable  that  this 
urmensch,  who  was  little  better  than  an  unmensch,  should  have 
been  able  at  once  to  arrange  his  words,  or,  what  amounts  to  the 
same  thing,  his  thoughts,  in  such  a  perfect  order  ?  I  incline  to 
believe  rather  that  logical,  orderly  thinking  and  speaking  have 
only  been  attained  by  mankind  after  a  long  and  troublesome 
struggle,  and  that  the  grammatical  expedient  of  a  fixed  word 
order  has  come  to  Chinese  as  to  European  languages  through 
a  gradual  development  in  which  other,  less  logical  and  more 
material  grammatical  appliances  have  in  course  of  time  been 
given  up. 

We  have  thus  arrived  at  a  conception  of  Chinese  which  is  toto 
ccbIo  removed  from  the  view  formerly  current.  The  Chinese  lan- 
guage can  no  longer  be  adduced  in  supj^ort  of  the  hj^jothesis  that 
our  Aryan  languages,  or  all  human  languages,  started  at  first  as 
a  grammarless  speech  consisting  of  monosyllabic  root-words. 

XIX.— §  5.  Recent  Investigations. 

I  have  rex)rinted  the  above  sketch  of  Chinese,  with  a  few  very^ 
insignificant  verbal  changes,  as  I  wrote  it  about  thirty  years  ago, 
because  I  think  that  the  main  reasoning  is  just  as  valid  now  as 
then,  and  because  everything  I  have  since  then  read  about  this 
interesting  language  has  only  confirmed  the  opinion  I  ventured 
to  express  after  what  was  certainly  a  very  insufficient  study. 
Chinese  pronunciation,  including  its  tones,  may  now  be  studied 
in  two  excellent  books,  dealing  with  two  different  dialects — Daniel 
Jones  and  K^\^ng  Tong  Woo,  A  Cantonese  Phonetic  Header,  London, 
1912,  and  Bemhard  Karlgren,  A  Mandarin  Phonetic  Reader  in 
the  Pekinese  Dialect,  Upsala,  Leipzig  and  Paris,  1917  (Archives 
d'jfitudes  Orientales,  vol.  13).  Karlgren  is  also  the  author  of 
Etudes  sur  la  Phonologic  Chinoiae  (ib.  vol.  15,  1915-19),  in  which 
he  deals  with  the  history  of  Chinese  sounds  and  the  reconstruction 


§5]  RECENT   INVESTIGATIONS  378 

of  the  old  pronunciation  in  a  thoroughly  scholarly  manner  on  the 
basis  of  an  intimate  knowledge  of  spoken  and  wTitten  Chinese, 
and  in  Ordet  och  pennan  i  mittens  rike  (Stockholm,  1918),  he  has 
given  a  masterly  popular  sketch  of  the  structure  of  the  Chinese 
language  and  its  system  of  wiiting. 

Of  the  greatest  importance  for  oiu*  purposes  is  the  same 
scholar's  recent  brilUant  discovery  of  a  real  case  distinction  in 
the  oldest  Chinese.  In  classical  Chinese  there  are  four  pronouns 
of  the  first  person  (I,  we)  which  have  always  been  considered  as 
absolutely  sjTionj'mous.  But  Karlgren  shows  that  the  two  of 
them  wliich  occur  as  the  usual  forms  in  Confucius's  conversations 
are  so  far  from  being  used  indiscriminately  that  one  is  nearly 
always  a  nominative  and  the  other  an  objective  case  ;  the  excep- 
tions are  not  numerous  and  are  easily  explained.  The  present 
Mandarin  pronunciation  of  the  first  is  [u],  of  the  second  either 
[uo]  or  [i]o].  But  if  we  go  back  to  the  sixth  century  of  our 
era  we  are  able  with  certainty  to  say  that  the  pronunciation  of 
the  former  wa^  [t^uo],  and  of  the  latter  [r/a].  This,  then,  consti- 
tutes a  real  declension.  Now,  in  the  second  person  Karlgren  is 
also  able  to  point  out  a  distinction  of  two  pronouns,  though  not 
quite  so  clearly  marked  as  in  the  first  person,  the  objective  showing 
here  a  greater  tendency  to  encroach  on  the  nominative  (Karlgren 
here  ingeniouslj'  adduces  the  parallel  from  our  languages  that 
the  fii'st  person  has  retained  the  suppletive  system  ego  :  me,  while 
the  second  uses  the  same  stem  tu  :  te).  The  oldest  Chinese  thus 
has  the  following  case  flexion  : 

l8t  Per.  2nd  Per. 

Nom.    T^uo  niiwo 

Obj.       ■j^a  niia 

(See  "  Le  Proto-chinois,  langue  flexionnelle,"  Journal  Asiatique, 
1920,  206  ff.).^ 

XIX.— §  6.  Roots  Again. 

To  return  to  roots.  The  influence  of  Indian  grammar  on 
European  linguists  Avith  regard  to  the  theory  of  roots  extended 
also  to  the  meanings  assigned  to  roots,  which  were  all  of  them 

*  I  must  also  mention  A.  Conrady,  Eiyie  indochinesische  Causativ-denomi- 
nativ-bildung  (Leipzig,  1896),  in  which  Lepsius's  theory  is  carried  a  great 
step  further  and  it  is  demonstrated  with  very  great  learning  that  many  of 
the  tone  relations  (as  well  as  modifications  of  initial  sounds)  of  Chinese 
and  kindred  languages  find  their  explanation  in  the  previous  existence  of 
prefixes  which  are  now  extinct,  but  which  can  still  be  pointed  out  in  Tibetan. 
Though  I  ought,  therefore,  to  have  spoken  of  prefixes  instead  of  '  flexional 
endings  '  above,  p.  371,  the  essence  of  the  contention  that  prehistoric  Chinese 
must  have  had  a  polysyllabic  and  non -isolating  structure  is  thus  borne  out 
by  the  researches  of  competent  specialists  in  this  field. 


374    ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS  [ch.  xix 

of  verbal  character,  and  nearly  always  highly  general  or  abstract, 
such  as  '  breathe,  move,  be  sharp  or  quick,  blow,  go,'  etc.  The 
impossibility  of  imagining  anybody  expressing  himself  by  means 
of  a  language  consisting  exclusively  of  such  abstracts  embarrassed 
people  much  less  than  one  would  expect  :  Chinese,  of  course,  has 
plenty  of  words  for  concrete  objects. 

The  usual  assumption  was  that  there  was  one  definite  root 
period  in  which  all  the  roots  were  created,  and  after  which  this 
form  of  activity  ceased.  But  Whitney  demurred  to  this  (M  36), 
saying  that  E.  preach  and  cost  may  be  considered  new  roots,  though 
ultimately  coming  from  Lat.  prce-dicare  and  con-stare :  these 
old  compounds  are  felt  as  units,  "  reducing  to  the  semblance  of 
roots  elements  that  are  really  derivative  or  compound."  As 
Whitney  goes  no  further  than  to  establish  the  semblance  of  new 
roots,  he  might  be  taken  as  an  adherent  rather  than  as  an  opponent 
of  the  theory  he  objects  to.  But,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  new  words 
are  created  in  modern  languages,  and  if  they  form  the  basis  of 
derived  words,  we  may  really  speak  of  new  roots  (pun — punning, 
punster  ;  fun — funny  ;  etc.).  Why  not  say  that  we  have  a  French 
root  roul  in  router,  rovlement,  roulaye,  roulier,  rouleau,  roulette, 
roulis  ?  This  only  becomes  unjustifiable  if  we  think  that  the 
establishment  of  this  root  gives  us  the  ultimate  explanation  of 
these  words  ;  for  then  the  linguistic  historian  steps  in  with  the 
objection  that  the  words  have  been  formed,  not  from  a  root,  but 
from  a  real  word,  A\'hich  is  not  even  in  itself  a  primary  word,  but 
a  derivative,  Lat.  rotula,  a  diminutive  of  rota  '  wheel.'  (I  take 
this  example  from  Breal  M  407).  To  the  i)oj)ular  instinct  sorrow 
and  sorry  are  undoubtedly  related  to  one  another,  and  we  may 
say  that  they  contain  a  root  sorr-  ;  but  a  thousand  jears  ago 
the}'  had  nothing  to  do  with  one  another,  and  belonged  to  different 
roots  :  OE.  sorg  '  care  '  and  sdrig  '  wounded,  afflicted.'  If  all* 
traces  of  Latin  and  Greek  were  lost,  a  linguist  would  have  no 
more  scruples  about  connecting  scene  with  see  than  most  illiterate 
Englishmen  have  now.  AVho  will  vouch  that  manj-  Aryan  roots 
may  hot  have  originated  at  various  times  through  similar  pro- 
cesses as  these  new  roots  preach,  cost,  ro2il,  sorr,  see  ? 

The  proper  definition  of  a  root  seems  to  be  :  what  is  common 
to  a  certain  number  of  words  felt  by  the  popular  instinct  of  the 
speakers  as  etymologically  belonging  together.  In  this  sense  we 
may  of  course  speak  of  roots  at  an}'  stage  of  an}'  language,  and 
not  only  at  a  hypothetical  initial  stage.  In  some  cases  these 
roots  may  be  used  as  separate  words  (E.  preach,  fun,  etc.,  Fr. 
roul  =  what  is  spelt  roule,  roules,  roulent)  ;  in  other  cases  this  is 
impossible  (Lat.  am  in  atno,  amor,  amicus ;  E.  sorr)  ;  in  many 
cases  because  the  common  element  cannot,  for  phonetic  reasons, 


§6]  ROOTS   AGAIN  875 

be  easily  pronounced,  as  when  E.  drinh,  drank,  drunk  or  sit,  sat, 
seat,  set  are  naturally  felt  to  belong  together,  though  it  is  impossible 
to  state  the  root  excejot  in  some  formula  like  dr.nk,  s.t,  where  the 
dot  stands  for  some  vowel.  Similar  considerations  may  be  adduced 
with  regard  to  the  consonants  if  we  want  to  establish  what  is  felt 
to  be  common  in  give  and  gift  {gi-\-  labiodental  spirant)  or  in  speak 
and  speech,  etc. ;  but  this  need  not  detain  us  here. 

In  my  view,  then,  the  root  is  something  real  and  important, 
though  not  alwaj's  tangible.  And  as  its  form  is  not  always  easy 
to  state  or  pronounce,  so  must  its  meaning,  as  a  rule,  be  somewhat 
vague  and  indeterminate,  for  what  is  common  to  several  ideas 
must  of  course  be  more  general  and  abstiact  than  either  of  the 
more  special  ideas  thus  connected  ;  it  is  also  natural  that  it  will 
oiten  be  necessary  to  state  the  signification  of  a  root  in  terms 
of  verbal  ideas,  for  these  are  more  general  and  abstract  than 
nominal  ideas.  But  roots  thus  conceived  belong  to  anj'  and  all 
periods,  and  we  must  cease  to  speak  of  the  earliest  period  of 
human  speech  as  '  the  root  period.' 


XIX.— §  7.  The  Agglutination  Theory. 

According  to  the  received  theory  (see  above,  §  1)  some  of  the 
roots  became  gradually  attached  to  other  roots  and  lost  their 
independence,  so  as  to  become  finally  formatives  fused  with  the 
root.  This  theory,  generally  called  the  agglutination  theory, 
contains  a  good  deal  of  truth  ;  but  we  can  onl}^  accept  it  with 
three  important  pro%asos,  namely,  first,  that  there  has  never  been 
one  definite  period  in  which  those  languages  which  are  now 
fiexional  were  wholly  agglutinative,  the  process  of  fusion  being 
liable  to  occur  at  an}'-  time  ;  second,  that  the  component  parts 
which  become  formatives  are  not  at  first  roots,  but  real  words  ; 
and  third,  that  this  process  is  not  the  only  one  by  which  forma- 
tives may  develop  :  it  may  be  called  the  rectilinear  process,  but 
by  the  side  of  that  we  have  also  more  circuitous  coiu"ses,  which 
are  no  less  important  in  the  life  of  languages  for  being  less 
obvious. 

In  the  process  of  coalescence  or  integration  there  are  many 
possible  stages,  with  may  be  denominated  figuratively  by  such 
expressions  as  that  two  words  are  placed  together  (that  is — in  non- 
figurative  language — pronounced  after  one  another),  tied  together, 
loiit  together,  glued  together  ('  agglutinated  '),  soldered  together, 
welded  together,  fused  together  or  amalgamated.  What  is  really 
the  most  important  part  of  the  process  is  the  degree  in  which  one 
of  the  comi^onents  loses  its  independence,  phonetically  and 
semantically. 


arc    ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS   [ch,  xix 

As  '  agglutination  '  is  thus  only  one  intermediate  stage  in 
a  continuous  process,  it  would  be  better  to  have  another  name 
for  the  whole  theory  of  the  origin  of  formatives  than  '  the  agglu- 
tination theory,'  and  I  propose  therefore  to  use  the  term  '  coales- 
cence theory.'  The  usual  name  also  fixes  the  attention  too 
exclusively  on  the  so-called  agglutinative  languages,  and  if  we 
take  the  formatives  of  such  a  language  as  Turkish,  as  in  sev-mek 
'  to  love,'  sev-il-mek  '  to  be  loved,'  sev-dir-mek  '  to  cause  to  love,' 
sev-dir-il-mek  '  to  be  made  to  love,'  sev-ish-mek  '  to  love  one 
another,'  sev-ish-dir-il-mek  '  to  be  made  to  love  one  another  ' — 
who  will  vouch  that  these  formatives  were  all  of  them  originally 
independent  words  ?  Those  who  are  most  competent  to  have 
an  opinion  on  the  matter  seem  nowadays  inclined  to  doubt  it 
and  to  reject  much  of  what  was  current  in  the  description  of  these 
languages  given  bj'  the  earlier  scholars  ;  see,  especially,  the  inter- 
esting final  chapter  of  V.  Granbech,  Forsttidier  til  tyrkisk  lydhistorie 
(KobenhaATi,  1902). 

XIX.— §8.  Coalescence. 

The  various  degrees  of  coalescence,  and  the  coexistence  at  the 
same  linguistic  period  of  these  various  degrees,  may  be  illustrated 
by  the  old  example,  English  un-tru-th-jid-ly,  and  by  German  iin- 
be-stimm-bar-keit.  Let  us  look  a  little  at  each  of  these  formatives. 
The  only  one  that  can  still  be  used  as  an  independent  word  is 
ful{\).  From  the  collocation  in  '  I  have  my  hand  full  of  peas  ' 
the  transition  is  easy  to  '  a  handful  of  peas,'  where  the  accentual 
subordination  of  full  to  ha7id  paves  the  waj^  for  the  combination 
becoming  one  word  instead  of  two  :  this  is  not  accomplished  till 
it  becomes  possible  to  put  the  plural  sign  at  the  end  {handfxds, 
thus  also  basket fuls  and  others),  while  in  less  familiar  combinations^ 
the  s  is  still  placed  in  the  middle  {bucketsful,  two  donkeysjid  of 
children,  see  MEG  ii.  2.  42).  In  these  substantives  -Jul  keeps  its 
full  vowel  [u].  But  in  adjectival  compounds,  such  as  peaceful, 
aivful,  there  is  a  colloquial  pronunciation  with  obscured  or  omitted 
vowel  [-fal,  -fl],  in  which  the  phonetic  connexion  with  the  full  word 
is  thus  weakened  ;  the  semantic  connexion,  too,  is  loosened  when 
it  becomes  possible  to  form  such  words  as  dreadful,  bashful,  in  which 
it  is  not  possible  to  use  the  definition  '  full  of  .  .  .'  Here,  then, 
the  transition  from  a  word  to  a  derivative  suffix  is  complete. 

English  -hood,  -head  in  childhood,  maidenhead  also  is  originallj'  an 
independent  word,  found  in  OE.  and  ME.  in  the  form  had,  meaning 
'  state,  condition,'  Gothic  haidus.  In  German  it  has  two  forms, 
•heit,  as  in  freiheit,  and  -keit,  whose  k  was  at  first  the  final  sound  of 
the  adjective  in  ewigkeit,  MHG.  eivecheit,  but  was  later  felt  as  part 


§8]  COALESCENCE  877 

of  the  suffix  and  then  transferred  to  cases  in  which  the  stem  had 
no  k,  as  in  tapferkeit,  ehrbarkeit. 

The  suffix  -ly  is  from  lik,  which  was  a  substantive  meaning 
'form,  appearance,  body'  ('a  dead  body'  in  Dan.  lig,  E.  Itch  in 
lichgate)  ;  manlik  thus  is  '  having  the  form  or  appearance  of  a 
man  '  ;  the  adjective  like  originally  was  ge-Uc  '  having  the  same 
appearance  with  '  (as  in  Lat,  con-fcnm-is).  In  compounds  -lik 
was  shortened  into  -hj  :  in  some  cases  we  still  have  com}3eting  forms 
like  gentlemanlike  and  gentlemanly.  The  ending  was,  and  is  still, 
used  extensively  in  adjectives  ;  if  it  is  now  also  used  to  turn 
adjectives  into  adverbs,  as  in  truthful-ly,  luxurious-ly,  this  is  a 
consequence  of  the  two  OE.  forms,  adj.  -He  and  adv.  -lice,  having 
phonetically  fallen  together. 

It  ma}'  perhaps  be  doubtful  whether  the  G.  suffix  -bar  (OHG. 
-bari,  OE.  bcere)  was  ever  really  an  independent  word,  but  its 
connexion  with  the  verb  beran,  E.  bear,  camiot  be  doubted : 
friichtbar  is  what  bears  fruit  (cf.  OE.  ceppelbcere  '  bearing  apples  '), 
but  the  connexion  was  later  loosened,  and  such  adjectives  as  ehrbar, 
kostbar,  offenhar  have  little  or  nothing  left  of  the  original  meaning 
of  the  suffix.  The  two  prefixes  in  our  examples,  wi-  and  be-, 
are  differentiated  forms  of  the  old  negative  ne  and  the  preposition 
by,  and  the  only  affix  in  our  two  long  words  which  is  thus  left 
unexplained  is  -th,  which  makes  true  into  tr^^tJl  and  is  found  also 
in  length,  health,  etc. 

XIX.— §  9.  Flexional  Endings. 

There  can  be  no  doubt,  therefore,  that  some  at  an}-  rate  of  our 
suffixes  and  prefixes  go  back  to  independent  words  which  have  been 
more  or  less  weakened  to  become  derivative  formatives.  But  does 
the  same  hold  good  Avith  those  endings  which  we  are  accustomed 
to  term  flexional  endings  ?  The  answer  certainly  must  be  in  the 
affirmative — with  regard  to  some  endings. 

Thus  the  Scandinavian  passive  originates  in  a  coalescence  of 
the  active  verb  and  the  pronoun  sik :  Old  Norse  (yeir)  finna  sik 
('  they  find  themselves  '  or  '  each  other  '),  gradually  becomes  one 
word  (yeir)  finna^k,  later  finnast,  finnaz,  Swedish  {de)  finnas,  Dan. 
(de)  findes  '  they  are  found.'  In  Old  Icelandic  the  pronoun  is 
still  to  some  extent  felt  as  such,  though  formally  an  indistinguish- 
able part  of  the  verb  ;  thus  combinations  like  the  following  are  very 
frequent:  Bolli  kvaz  yessu  r&6a  vilja  =  kva'S  sik  vilja;  "Bolli  dixit 
se  velle :  B.  said  that  he  would  have  his  own  way  "  (Laxd.  55).  In 
Danish  a  distinction  can  sometimes  be  made  between  a  reflexive 
and  a  purely  passive  employment  :  de  slds  with  a  short  vowel  is 
'  they  fight  (one  another),'  but  with  a  long  vowel '  they  are  beaten.' 


378     ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS    [ch.  xix 

A  similar  coalescence  is  taking  place  in  Russian,  where  sja  '  himself  ' 
(myself,  etc.)  dwindles  down  to  a  sufl&xeds :  kazalos  '  it  showed  itself , 
turned  out.' 

A  similar  case  is  the  Romanic  future  :  It.  finiro,  Sp.  finire, 
Fr.  finirai,  from  finire  habeo  (finir  ho,  etc.),  originally  '  I  have  to 
finish.'  Before  the  coalescence  was  complete,  it  was  jDOssible  to 
insert  a  pronoun,  Old  Sp.  cantar-te-M  '  I  shall  sing  to  you.' 

A  third  case  in  point  is  the  suffixed  definite  article,  if  we  are 
allowed  to  consider  that  as  a  kind  of  flexion  :  Old  Norse  mannenn 
{manninn)  accusative  '  the  man,'  landet  (landit)  '  the  land  '  ;  Dan. 
nianden,  landet,  from  mann,  land -{-the  demonstrative  pronoun  enn, 
neuter  et.  Rumanian  domnnl  '  the  lord,'  from  Lat.  dominu{m) 
illu{m),  is  another  example. 


XIX.— §  10.  Validity  of  the  Theory. 

Now,  does  this  kind  of  explanation  admit  of  universal  applica- 
tion— in  other  words,  were  all  our  derivative  affixes  and  flexional 
endings  originally  independent  words  before  they  were  '  glued  ' 
to  or  fused  with  the  main  word  ?  This  has  been  the  prevalent,  one 
might  almost  say  the  orthodox,  view  of  all  the  leading  linguists, 
who  may  be  mustered  in  formidable  array  in  defence  of  the 
agglutination  theorJ^^ 

Against  the  universahty  of  this  origin  for  formatives  I  adduced 
in  my  former  work  (1894,  p.  66  f.,  cf.  Kasus,  1891,  p.  36)  four 
reasons,  which  I  shall  here  restate  in  a  different  order  and  in  a 
fuller  form. 

(1)  Nothing  can  be  proved  with  regard  to  the  ultimate  genesis 
of  flexion  in  general  from  the  adduced  examples,  for  in  all  of  them 
the  elements  were  already  fulh^  flexional  before  the  coalescence 
(cf.  ON.  finnask,  fannsk  ;  It.  finird,  finirai,  finira  ;  ON.  ma'^renn, 
mannenn,  mansens,  etc.).  What  they  show,  then,  is  really  nothing 
but  the  growth  of  new  flexional  formations  on  an  old  flexional 
soil,  and  it  might  be  imagined  that  the  fusion  would  not  have  taken 
place,  or  not  so  completely,  if  the  minds  of  the  speakers  had  not 
been  alread}"^  prepared  to  accept  formations  of  this  character. 
I  do  not,  however,  attach  much  importance  to  this  argument,  and 
turn  to  those  that  are  more  cogent. 

(2)  The   number  of   actual  forms  proved  beyond  a  doubt  to 

1  Madvig  Kl  170,  Max  Miiller  L  1.  271,  Whitney  OLS  1.  283,  G  124,  Paul 
P  Ist  ed.  181,  repeated  in  the  following  editions,  see  4th,  1909,  350  and  347, 
349;  Brugmann  VG  1889,  2.  1  (but  in  2nd  ed.  this  has  been  struck  out  in 
favour  of  hopeless  skepticism),  Schuchardt,  Anlaas  d.  Volapuks  11,  Gabelentz 
Spr  189,  Tegner  SM  53,  Sweet,  New  Engl.  Or.  §  559,  Storm,  Engl.  Phil.  673, 
Rozwadowski,  Wortbildung  u.  Worthed.,  Uhlenbeck,  Karakt.  d.  bask.  Qramm. 
24,   Siitterlin  WGS  1902,   122,  Porzezinski,  Spr  1910,  229. 


§10]  VALIDITY   OF   THE   THEORY  379 

have  originated  through  coalescence  is  comparatively  small.  It  is 
true  that  not  a  few  derivative  S3'llables  were  originally  independent ; 
still,  if  we  compare  them  with  the  number  of  those  for  which  no 
such  origin  has  been  proved  or  even  proposed,  we  find  that  the 
proportion  is  very  small  indeed.  In  the  list  of  English  suffixes 
enumerated  in  Sweet's  Grammar,  only  eleven  can  be  traced  back 
to  independent  words,  while  74  are  not  thus  explicable.  Anyone 
going  through  the  countless  suffixes  enumerated  in  the  second 
volume  of  Brugmann's  Vergleichende  Grammatik  will,  I  think, 
be  struck  with  the  impossibility  of  any  great  number  of  them  being 
traced  back  to  words  in  the  same  way  as  hood,  etc.,  above :  their 
forms  and,  still  more,  their  vague  spheres  of  meaning,  and  on  the 
whole  their  maimer  of  application,  distinctly  speak  against  such 
an  origin. 

As  to  real  flexional  endings  traceable  to  words,  theii-  number 
is  even  comparatively  smaller  than  that  of  derivative  suffixes  ; 
the  three  or  four  instances  named  above  are  everywhere  appealed 
to,  but  are  there  so  many  more  than  these  ?  And  are  they 
numerous  enough  to  justify  so  general  an  assertion  ?  IMy  impres- 
sion is  that  the  basis  for  the  induction  is  very  far  from  sufficient. 

(3)  This  argument  is  strengthened  when  we  are  able  to  point 
out  instances  in  which,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  flexional  endings  have 
arisen  in  a  way  that  is  totally  opposed  to  the  agglutinative,  which 
then  must  renounce  all  claims  to  be  the  only  possible  way  for  a 
language  to  arrive  at  flexional  formatives.  See  below  (§  13)  on 
Secretion. 

(4)  Assuming  the  theory  to  be  true,  we  should  expect  much 
greater  regularity,  both  in  formal  (morphological)  and  in  semantic 
(syntactic)  respect  than  we  actually  find  in  the  old  Aryan  languages  ; 
for  if  one  defuiite  element  was  added  to  signify  one  definite  modifi- 
cation of  the  idea,  we  see  no  reason  why  it  should  not  have  been 
added  to  all  words  in  the  same  way.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the 
Romanic  future,  the  Scandinavian  passive  voice  and  definite  article 
present  much  greater  regularity  than  is  found  in  the  flexion  of 
nouns  and  verbs  in  old  Aryan, 


XIX.— §  11.  Irregularity  Original. 

It  will  be  objected  that  the  irregularity  which  we  find  in  these 
old  languages  is  of  later  growth,  and  that,  in  fact,  flexion,  as 
Schuchardt  says,  is  "anomal  gewordene  agglutination."  Whitney 
said  that  ''  each  suffix  has  its  distinct  meaning  and  office,  and  is 
applied  in  a  whole  class  of  analogous  words  "  (L.  254),  and  in  reading 
Schleicher's  Compendium  one  gains  the  impression  that  the  old 
Aryan  sounds  and  forms  were  like  a  regiment  of  well -trained  soldiers 


380    ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS    [ch.  xix 

marching  along  in  the  best  military  style,  wliile  all  irregularities 
were  the  result  of  later  decay  in  each  language  separately.  But 
the  trend  of  the  whole  scientific  development  of  the  last  fifty  years 
has  been  in  the  direction  of  demonstrating  more  and  more  irregu- 
larity in  the  original  forms  :  where  formerly  only  one  ending  was 
assumed  for  the  same  case,  etc.,  now  several  are  asr^umed.  (See,  e.g., 
Walde  in  Streitberg's  Oesch.,  2.  194,  Thumb,  ib.  2.  69.)  And  as 
with  the  forms,  so  also  with  the  meanings  and  applications  of  the 
forms,  Madvig  as  early  as  1857  (p.  27.  Kl  202)  had  seen  that  the 
signification  of  the  grammatical  forms  must  originally  have  been 
extremely  vague  and  fluctuating,  but  most  scliolars  went  on  imagin- 
ing that  each  case,  each  tense,  each  mood  had  originally  stood  for 
something  quite  settled  and  definite,  until  gradually  the  progress  of 
linguistics  made  away  with  that  conception  point  by  point.  In  place 
of  the  belief  that  the  original  Arj-an  verb  had  a  definite  system  of 
tense  forms,  it  is  now  generally  assumed  that  different  '  aspects  ' 
('aktionsarten'),  somewhat  like  those  of  Slav  verbs,  were  indicated, 
and  that  the  notion  of  '  time  '  differences  was  only  afterwards 
developed  out  of  the  notion  of  aspect :  but  if  we  compare  the 
divisions  and  definitions  of  these  aspects  given  by  various  scholars, 
Me  see  how  essentially  vague  this  notion  is  ;  instead  of  being  a 
model  system  of  nice  logical  distinctions,  the  original  condition 
must  rather  have  been  one  in  which  such  notions  as  duration, 
completion,  result,  beginning,  repetition  A^ere  indistinctly  found 
as  germs,  from  which  such  ideas  as  perfect  and  imperfect,  past 
and  present,  were  finally  evolved  with  greater  and  greater  clearness. 
Similar  remarks  apply  to  moods.  All  attempts  at  finding 
out,  deductivel}'  or  inductively,  the  fundamental  notion  (grund- 
begriff)  attached  to  such  a  mood  as  the  subjunctive  have  failed  : 
it  is  impossible  to  establish  one  original,  sharply  circumscribed 
sphere  of  usage,  from  which  all  the  various,  partly  conflicting, 
usages  in  the  actually  existing  languages  can  be  derived.  The 
usual  theory  is  that  there  existed  one  true  subjunctive,  charac- 
terized by  long  thematic  vowels  -e-,  -a-,  -6-,  and  distinct  from  that 
an  optative,  characterized  \>y  a  formative  -ie-  :  -j-,i  and  that  these 
two  were  fused  in  Latin.  But,  as  Oertel  and  Morris  have  shown 
in  their  valuable  article  "  An  Examination  of  the  Theories  regarding 
the  Nature  and  Origin  of  Indo-European  Inflection  "  {Harvard 
Studies  in  Classical  Philol.  XVI,  1905)  it  is  probably  safer  to  assume 
for   the   Indo-European   period  substantial   identity   of   meaning 

^  Two  explanations  of  this  formative  element  were  given  by  the  old 
school:  according  to  Schleicher  C  §290,  it  was  the  root  ja  of  tlie  relative 
pronoun  ;  according  to  Curtius  and  others  it  was  the  root  i  '  to  go,'  Greek 
Jcr-o-i-mi  being  analyzed  as  '  I  go  to  bear,'  whence,  by  an  easy  (?)  transition, 
'  I  should  like  to  bear,'  etc. 


§11]  IRREGULARITY   ORIGINAL  381 

in  the  modal  formatives  ie  :  I  and  the  long  thematic  vowels  -e-,  -a-, 
-0-,  which  were  then  continued  undifferentiated  in  Latin,  while  on 
the  one  hand  the  Germanic  branch  has  practically  discarded  the 
forms  with  long  thematic  vowel  and  confined  itself  to  the  t  suflSx, 
and  on  the  other  hand  two  branches,  Greek  and  Indo-Iranic, 
have  availed  themselves  of  the  formal  difference  and  separated  a 
'  subjunctive  '  and  an  '  optative  '  mood. 


XIX.— §  12.  Coalescence  Theory  dropped. 

In  the  historical  part  I  have  already  mentioned  some  instances 
of  coalescence  explanations  of  Aryan  forms  which  have  been  aban- 
doned by  most  scholars,  such  as  the  theory  that  the  r  of  the  Latin 
passive  is  a  disguised  se,  which  would  agree  very  well  with  the 
Scandinavian  passive,  but  falls  to  the  ground  when  one  remembers 
that  corresponding  forms  arc  found  in  Keltic,  where  the  transition 
from  s  to  r  is  otherwise  unknown  :  these  forms  are  now  believed 
to  be  related  to  some  r  forms  found  in  Sanskrit,  but  there  not 
possessed  of  any  passive  signification,  this  latter  being  thus  a 
comparatively  late  acquisition  of  Keltic  and  Italic  :  these  two 
branches  turning  an  existing,  non-meaning  consonant  to  excellent 
use  in  their  flexional  sj^stem  and  generalizing  it  in  the  new 
application. 1 

The  explanation  of  the  '  weak '  Gothonic  preterit  from  a 
coalescence  of  did  {loved  =  love  did)  was  long  one  of  the  strong- 
holds of  the  agglutination  theory,  Bopp's  original  collocation  of 
these  forms  with  other  forms  which  could  not  be  thus  explained 
(see  above  51)  having  passed  into  oblivion.  Now  we  have  Collitz's 
comprehensive  book  Das  schuxiche  Prdteritum,  1912,  in  which  the 
formative  consonant  is  shown  to  have  been  Aryan  t,  and  the  close 
correspondence  not  only  with  the  passive  participle,  but  also  with 
the  verbal  nouns  in  -ti  is  duly  emj^hasized. 

The  impossibility  of  explaining  the  Latin  perfect  in  -vi  from 
composition  with  fui  has  been  demonstrated  by  Mcrguet  (see  Walde 
in  Streitberg's  Gesch.,  2.  220).  Instead  of  this  rectilinear  explana- 
tion, scholars  now  incline  to  assume  an  intricate  play  of  various 
analogical  influences  starting  from  a  pre-ethnic  perfect  in  w  in 
isolated  instances. 

Many  have  explained  the  case  ending  -8  as  a  coalesced  demon- 
strative pronoun  sa  or,  as  it  is  now  given,  so  ;  the  difficulty  that  the 
same  s  denotes  now  the  nominative  and  now  the  genitive  ^^as  got  over 

^  Cf.  Sommor,  Lat.  528,  and  on  Armenian  and  Tokharian  r  forma  MSL 
18.  10  ff.  and  Feist  KI  455.  But  it  must  not  be  overlooked  that  H.  Pedersen 
(KZ  40.  166  ff.)  has  revived  and  strengthened  the  old  theory  that  r  in  Italic 
and  Keltic  is  an  original  se. 


3S2    ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS    [ch.  xix 

by  Curtius  (C  12)  by  the  assumption  that  sa  was  added  at  two  distinct 
periods,  and  that  each  period  made  a  different  use  of  the  addition, 
though  Curtius  does  not  tell  us  how  one  or  the  other  function  could 
be  evolved  from  such  a  pronoun.  The  latest  attempt  at  explana- 
tion, which  reaches  me  as  I  am  writing  this  chapter,  is  by  Hermann 
Holler  (ICZ  49.  219)  :  according  to  him  the  common  Aryan  and 
Semitic  nominative  ended  in  o  and  the  genitive  in  e,  but  to  this  was 
added  in  the  masculine,  and  more  rarely  in  the  feminine,  the  pronoun 
s  as  a  definite  article,  so  that  the  primitive  form  corresponding  to 
Lat.  lupus  meant  '  the  wolf  '  and  lupu  '  (a)  wolf  '  ;  later  the  s-less 
form  was  given  up,  and  lupus  came  to  be  used  for  both  '  the  wolf  ' 
and  '  wolf  '  (similarly  presumably  in  the  genitive,  if  we  translate 
the  presumed  original  forms  into  Latin  lupis  '  the  wolf's  '  and 
hipi '  (a)  wolf's,'  later  lupi  in  both  functions).  In  Semitic,  inversely, 
an  element  m,  corresponding  to  the  Aryan  accusative  ending, 
was  added  as  an  indefinite  article,  the  w-less  form  thus  becoming 
definite,  but  in  the  oldest  Babylonian-AssjTian  the  distinction  has 
been  given  up,  and  the  form  in  m  is  (like  the  Latin  form  in  s)  used 
both  definitely  and  indefinitely.  Ingenious  as  these  constructions 
are,  the  whole  theory  seems  to  me  highly  artificial,  and  it  is  difficult 
to  imagine  that  both  Aryans  and  Semites,  after  ha\dng  evolved 
such  a  valuable  distinction  as  that  between  '  the  wolf '  and  '  a 
wolf,'  expressed  by  simple  means,  should  have  wilfully  given  it 
up — to  evolve  it  again  in  a  later  period.^  Fortunately  one  is 
allowed  to  confess  one's  ignorance  of  the  origin  of  the  case 
endings  s  and  m,  but  if  I  were  on  pain  of  death  to  choose 
between  Holler's  hypothesis  and  the  suggestion  thrown  out  by 
Humboldt  (Versch  129),  that  the  light  (high-pitched)  s  symbolized 
the  living  (personal)  and  active  (the  subject),  and  the  dark  (low- 
pitched)  m  the  lifeless  (neutral)  and  passive  (the  object),  I  should 
certainly  prefer  the  latter  explanation. 

Hirt  (GDS  37)  also  thinks  that  the  s  found  in  Arj^an  cases 
is  an  originally  independent  word,  only  he  thinks  that  this  se, 
so  was  not  originally  a  demonstrative  pronomi,  but  the  particle, 
which  with  the  extension  i  is  foimd  in  Gothic  sai  '  ecce,'  and  as 
it  can  thus  be  compared  with  the  particle  c  in  Lat.  Iiic,  it  is  clear 
that  it  might  be  added  in  all  cases — and  as  a  matter  of  fact  Hirt 
finds  it  in  six  different  cases  in  the  singular  and  in  all  cases  in  the 
plural  except  the  genitive.  Hirt  makes  no  attempt  at  explaining 
how  these  various  case-forms  have  come  to  acquire  the  signification 
(function)  with  which  we  find  them  in  the  oldest  documents  ; 
"  the  s  element  had  nothing  to  do  with  the  denotation  of  an}'  case, 
number  or  gender,  and  only  after  it  had  been  added  to  some  cases 

*  If  s  was  a  definite  article,  why  should  it  be  used  only  with  some  stems 
and  not  with  others  ?     ^Vhy  should  neuters  never  require  a  definite  article  7 


§12]  COALESCENCE    THEORY  DROPPED  888 

and  not  to  others  could  it  come  to  be  distinctive  of  cases  "  (p.  39). 
In  other  words,  liis  explanation  explains  just  nothing  at  all.  The 
same  is  true  with  regard  to  the  '  particles  '  07n  or  em,  e,  o,  i,  which 
he  thinks  were  added  in  other  cases,  and  when  he  ends  (p.  42) 
by  sa3dng  that  "  this  must  be  sufficient  to  give  a  glimpse  of  the 
way  in  which  Aryan  flexion  originated,"  the  only  thing  we  have 
really  seen  is  the  haphazard  waj-  in  which  this  flexion  is  formed, 
and  the  impossibility  at  present  of  arriving  at  a  fully  satisfactory 
explanation  of  these  things.  I  should  especially  demur  to  the  two 
suppositions  underlying  Hirt's  theory  that  Aryan  had  at  one 
period  a  completely  flexionless  structure,  and  that  the  same  sound 
when  occurring  in  various  cases  must  have  had  the  same  origin  : 
it  seems  much  more  probable  to  me  that  the  s  of  the  nominative 
and  the  s  of  the  genitive  were  not  at  first  identical. ^ 

That  item  of  the  coalescence  theory  which  probably  appealed 
most  to  the  fancy  of  scholars  and  laymen  alike  was  the  explanation 
of  the  personal  endings  in  the  verbs  from  the  personal  pronouns  : 
we  have  an  m  in  the  first  person  of  the  mi-verbs  (esmi)  and  in  the 
pronoun  me,  etc.,  and  we  have  a  t  in  the  third  person  (esti)  and 
in  a  third-person  pronoun  or  demonstrative  (to)  ;  it  is,  therefore, 
quite  natural  to  think  that  esmi  is  simply  the  root  es  'to  be  ' -j- the 
pronoun  mi  '  I,'  and  esti  es  -f- the  other  pronoun,  and  to  extend 
this  view  to  the  other  persons.  And  yet  not  even  this  has  been 
allowed  to  stand  unchallenged  by  later  disrespectful  linguists, 
headed  by  A.  H.  Sayce  (Techmer's  Zeitschr.  /.  allg.  Sprwiss.  i.  22) 
and  Hirt.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  theory  is  based  exclusively 
on  the  above-mentioned  correspondence  in  the  first  and  third 
persons  singular,  while  the  dual  and  plural  endings  do  not  at  ail 
agi-ee  -wdth  the  corresponding  personal  pronouns  and  the  endings 
of  the  second  person  can  only  be  compared  with  the  pronoun 
through  the  employment  of  phonological  tricks  unworthy  of  a 
scientific  linguist.  Even  in  the  first  person  the  correspondence 
is  not  complete,  for  besides  -mi  we  have  other  endings  :  -m,  which 
cannot  be  very  well  considered  a  shortened  -mi  (and  which  agrees, 

^  While  it  is  difficult  to  see  the  relation  between  a  demonstrative  pronoun 
or  a  deictic  particle  and  genitival  function,  it  would  be  easy  enough  to  under- 
stand the  latter  if  we  started  from  a  possessive  pronoun  (ejus,  suus),  and, 
curiously  enough,  we  find  this  very  sound  s  used  as  a  sign  for  the  genitive 
in  two  independent  languages,  starting  from  that  notion.  In  Indo-Portuguese 
we  have  gohernadors  casa  '  governor's  house,'  from  gobernador  su  casa  (above, 
Ch.  XI  §  12,  p.  213),  and  in  the  Sovith-African  '  Taal  '  the  usual  expression 
for  the  genitive  is  by  means  of  syn,  which  is  generally  shortened  into  se  (s) 
and  glued  enclitically  to  the  substantive,  even  to  feminines  and  plurals  : 
Marie-se  boek  '  Maria's  book,'  di  goivweneur  se  hond  '  the  governor's  dog  ' 
(H.  Meyer,  Die  Sprache  der  Buren,  I90I,  p.  40,  where  also  the  confusion 
with  the  adjective  ending  -s,  in  Dutch  spelt  -sch,  is  mentioned.  For  the 
construction  compare  G.  dem  voter  sein  hut  and  others  from  various  languages ; 
cf.  the  appendix  on  E.  Bill  Stumps  his  mark  in  ChE  182  f.). 


38i    ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS  [ch.  xix 

as  Saycc  remarks,  much  more  closely  with  the  accusative  ending 
of  nouns),  -o  and  -a,  neither  of  which  can  be  explained  from  any 
kno^^•n  pronoun.  There  is  thus  nothing  for  it  except  to  say,  as 
Brugmann  does  (KG  §  770)  :  "  The  origin  of  the  personal  endings 
is  not  clear";  of,  also  ISIisteli  47:  "The  relations  between  personal 
endings  and  the  independent  personal  pronouns  must  be  much 
more  evident  to  justify  this  view.  .  .  .  The  Aryan  language 
offers  direct  evidence  against  the  assumption  that  a  sentence  has 
been  thus  drawn  together,  because  it  uses  in  the  verbal  forms  of 
the  first  and  third  person  sg.  pronominal  stems  which  are  otherwise 
employed  only  as  objects,  and,  moreover,  would  here  place  the 
subject  after  the  predicate,  though  in  sentences  it  observes  the 
opposite  order."  Meillet  expresses  himself  ver}'  categorically 
{Bulletin  de  la  Soc.  de  Ling.  1911,  143)  :  "Scarcely  any  linguist 
who  has  studied  Aryan  languages  would  venture  to  affirm  that 
*-»nt  of  the  type  Gr.  femi  is  an  old  personal  pronoun." 

The  impression  left  on  us  bj^  all  these  cases  is  that  many 
of  the  earlier  explanations  by  agglutination  have  proved  imsatis- 
factory,  and  that  linguists  are  nowadays  inclined  either  to  leave 
the  forms  entirely  unexplained  or  else  to  admit  less  rectilinear 
developments,  in  which  we  see  the  speakers  of  the  old  languages 
groping  tentatively  after  means  of  expression  and  finding  them 
only  by  devious  and  circuitous  courses.  It  is,  of  coiu-se,  difficult 
to  classify  such  explanations,  and  the  agglutination  or  coalescence 
theory  has  to  be  supplemented  by  various  other  kinds  of 
explanation  ;  but  I  tliink  one  of  these,  which  has  not  received 
its  legitimate  share  of  attention,  is  important  and  distinctive 
enough  to  have  its  own  name,  and  I  propose  to  terra  it  the 
'  secretion '  theory. 

XIX.— §  18.  Secretion. 

By  secretion  I  understand  the  phenomenon  that  one  integral 
portion  of  a  word  comes  to  acquire  a  grammatical  signification 
Avhich  it  had  not  at  first,  and  is  then  felt  as  something  added  to 
the  word  itself.  Secretion  thus  is  a  consequence  of  a  '  metanalysis  ' 
(above,  Ch.  X  §  2) ;  it  shows  its  full  force  when  the  element 
thus  secreted  comes  to  be  added  to  other  words  not  originally 
possessing  tliis  element. 

A  clear  instance  is  offered  in  the  history  of  some  English  posses- 
sive pronouns.  In  Old  English  min  and  pin  the  n  is  kept  through- 
out as  part  and  parcel  of  the  words  themijelves,  the  other  cases 
ha\ing  such  forms  as  mine,  minitm,  minre,  exactly  as  in  Gorman 
mein,  meine,  meinem,  meiner,  etc.  But  in  ^Middle  English  the 
endings  wore  gradually  dropped,  and  min  and  pin  for  a  short  time 


§  13]  SECRETION  385 

became  the  only  forms.  Soon,  however,  n  was  dropped  before 
substantives  beginning  with  a  consonant,  but  was  retained  in 
other  positions  {my  father — mine  uncle,  it  is  mine)  ;  then  the 
former  form  was  transferred  also  to  those  cases  in  which  the  pro- 
noun was  used  (as  an  adjunct)  before  words  beginning  with  vowels 
{my  father,  my  uncle — ^it  is  mine).  The  distinction  between  my 
and  mine,  thy  and  thine,  which  was  originally  a  purely  phonetic 
one,  exactly  like  that  between  a  and  an  {a  father,  an  uncle),  gradu- 
ally acquired  a  functional  value,  and  now  serves  to  distinguish  an 
adjunct  from  a  principal  (or,  to  use  the  terms  of  some  grammars, 
a  conjoint  from  an  absolute  form) ;  7ny  came  to  be  looked  upon  as 
the  proper  form,  while  the  7i  of  mine  was  felt  as  an  ending  serving 
to  indicate  the  function  as  a  principal  word.  That  this  is  really 
the  instinctive  feeling  of  the  people  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  in 
dialectal  and  vulgar  speech  the  same  n  is  added  to  his,  her,  your 
and  their,  to  form  the  new  pronouns  hisn,  hern,  yourn,  theirn  : 
"  He  that  prigs  what  isn't  hisn,  when  he's  cotch'd,  is  sent  to 
prison.  She  that  prigs  what  isn't  hern,  At  the  treadmill  takes 
a  turn." 

Another  instance  of  secretion  is  -en  as  a  plural  ending  in  E. 
oexn,  G.  ochsen,  etc.  Here  originally  n  belonged  to  the  word  in 
all  cases  and  all  numbers,  just  as  much  as  the  preceding  s  ;  ox 
was  an  n  stem  in  the  same  way  as,  for  instance,  Lat.  (homo), 
homi^iem,  homiwis,  etc.,  or  Gr.  kuow,  kuwa,  kuwos,  etc.,  are  n  stems. 
In  Gothic  n  is  foimd  in  most  of  the  cases  of  similar  n  stems. 
In  OE.  the  nom.  is  oxa,  the  other  cases  in  the  sg.  oxan,  pi.  oxan 
{oxen),  oxnum,  oxena,  but  in  ME.  the  w-less  form  is  found  throughout 
the  singular  (gen.  analogicallj''  oxes),  and  the  plural  only  kept  -n. 
Thus  also  a  great  many  other  words,  e.g.  (I  give  the  plural  forms) 
apen,  haren,  sterren  (stars),  tungen,  siden,  eyen,  which  all  of  them 
belonged  to  the  n  declension  in  OE.  When  -en  had  thus  become 
established  as  a  plural  sign,  it  was  added  analogically  to  words 
which  were  not  originally  n  stems,  e.g.  ME,  caren,  synnen,  treen 
(OE.  cara,  synna,  treoio),  and  this  ending  even  seemed  for  some 
time  destined  to  be  the  most  usual  plural  ending  in  the  South 
of  England,  until  it  was  finally  supplanted  by  -5,  which  had  been  the 
prevalent  ending  in  the  North  ;  eyen,  foen,  shoen  were  for  a  time  in 
competition  Avith  eyes,  foes,  shoes,  and  now  -n  is  only  found  in  oxen 
(and  children).  In  German  to-day  things  are  very  much  as  they 
were  in  Southern  ME.  :  -en  is  kept  extensively  in  the  old  n  stems 
and  is  added  to  some  words  which  had  formerly  other  endings,  e.g. 
hirten,  soldaten,  thaten.  The  result  is  that  now  plmality  is  indicated 
by  an  ending  which  had  formerly  no  such  function  (which,  indeed, 
had  no  function  at  all)  ;  for  if  we  look  upon  the  actual  language, 
oxen  (G.  ochsen)  is  =  ox  {ochs)  singular  -|-  the  plural  ending  -en ; 

25 


88G     ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS  [ch.  xix 

only  we  must  not  on  any  account  imagine  that  the  form  was 
originally  thus  welded  together  (agglutinated) — and  if  in  G.  soldaten 
we  may  speak  of  -en  being  glued  on  to  soldat,  this  ending  is  not, 
and  has  never  been,  an  independent  word,  but  is  an  originally 
insignificative  part  secreted  by  other  words. 

A  closely  similar  case  is  the  plural  ending  -er.  The  consonant 
originally  was  s,  as  seen,  for  instance,  in  the  Gr.  and  Lat.  nom. 
genos,  genus,  gen.  Gr.  gene{s)os,  genous,  Lat.  generis  for  older 
genesis.  In  Gothonic  languages  s,  m  accordance  with  a  regular 
soimd  shift  in  this  case,  became  r  (through  z)  whenever  it  was 
retained,  but  in  the  nom.  sg.  it  was  dropped,  and  thus  we  have 
in  OE.  sg.  lamb,  lambe,  lambes,  but  in  the  pi.  lambru,  lambrum, 
lambra.  In  English  only  few  words  show  traces  of  this  flexion, 
thus  OE.  did,  pi.  cildru,  ME.  child,  childer,  whence,  with  an  added 
-en,  our  modern  children.  But  in  German  the  class  had  much  more 
vitality,  and  we  have  not  only  words  belonging  to  it  of  old,  like 
lamm,  pi.  Idmmer,  rind,  rinder,  but  also  gradually  more  and  more 
words  which  originally  belonged  to  other  classes,  but  adopted  this 
ending  after  it  had  become  a  real  sign  of  the  plural  number,  thus 
worter,  biicher. 

There  is  one  trait  that  should  be  noticed  as  highly  characteristic 
of  these  instances  of  secretion,  that  is,  that  the  occurrence  of  the 
endings  originating  in  this  way  seems  from  the  first  regulated 
by  the  purest  accident,  seen  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  speakers  : 
they  are  found  in  some  words,  but  not  in  others,  whereas  the 
endings  treated  of  under  the  heading  Coalescence  are  added  much 
more  uniformly  to  the  whole  of  the  vocabulary.  But  as  a  simi- 
larly irregular  or  arbitrary  distribution  is  met  with  in  the  case 
of  nearly  all  fiexional  endings  in  the  oldest  stages  of  languages 
belonging  to  our  family  of  speech,  the  probability  is  that  most 
of  those  endings  which  it  is  impossible  for  us  to  trace  back  to 
their  first  beginnings  have  originated  through  secretion  or  similar 
processes,  rather  than  through  coalescence  of  independent  words 
or  roots. 

XIX.— §  14.  Extension  o£  Suffixes. 

A  special  subdivision  of  secretion  comj^rises  those  cases  in 
which  a  suffix  takes  over  some  sound  or  sounds  from  words  to  which 
it  was  added.  Clear  instances  are  found  in  French,  where  in 
consequence  of  the  mutescence  of  a  final  consonant  some  suffixes 
to  the  popular  instinct  must  seem  to  begin  with  a  consonant, 
though  originally  this  did  not  belong  to  the  suffix.  Thus  laitier, 
at  first  formed  from  lait  -f  ^^r,  now  came  to  be  apprehended  as 
=  lai{t)  +  tier,  and  cabaretier   as  cabare{t)  -f-  tier,   and   the   new 


§14]  EXTENSION   OF   SUFFIXES  887 

suffix  was  then  used  to  form  such  new  words  as  bijoutier,  ferblantier, 
cafetier  and  others.  In  the  same  way  we  have  tabatiere,  where 
we  should  expect  tabaquiere,  and  the  predilection  for  the  extended 
form  of  the  suffix  is  evidently  strengthened  by  the  syllable  division 
in  frequent  formations  like  ren-tier,  por-tier,  por-tiere,  charpen-tier. 
In  old  Gothonic  we  have  similar  extensions  of  suffixes,  when  instead 
of  -ing  we  get  -liiig,  starting  from  words  like  OHG.  ediling  from  edili, 
ON.  vesUng  from  vesall,  OE.  lytling  from  lytel,  etc.  Consequently 
we  have  in  English  quite  a  number  of  words  with  the  extended 
enchng :  duckling,  gosling,  hireling,  iinderling,  etc.  In  Gothic 
some  words  formed  with  -assus,  such  as  ]>iudin-assus  'kingdom,' 
were  apprehended  as  formed  with  -nassus,  and  in  all  the  related 
languages  the  suffix  is  onl}'-  knowTi  with  the  initial  n ;  thus  in  E. 
-ness  :  hardness,  happiness,  eagerness,  etc. ;  G.  -keit  with  its  k  from 
adjectives  in  -tchas  already  been  mentioned  (376).  From  criticism, 
Scotticism,  we  have  ivitti-cism,  and  Milton  has  ivitticaster  on  the 
analogy  of  criticaster,  where  the  suffix  of  course  is  -aster,  as  in 
poetaster.  Instead  of  -ist  we  also  find  in  some  cases  -nist : 
tobacconist,  lutenist  (cf.  botan-ist,  mechan-ist). 

To  form  a  new  word  it  is  often  sufficient  that  some  existing 
word  is  felt  in  a  vague  way  to  be  made  up  of  something  +  an  ending, 
the  latter  being  subsequently  added  on  to  another  word.  In 
Fr.  merovingien  the  v  of  course  is  legitimate,  as  the  adjective  is 
derived  from  Merovee,  Merowig,  but  this  word  was  made  the  starting- 
point  for  the  word  designating  the  succeeding  dynasty :  carlovingien, 
where  v  is  simply  taken  over  as  part  of  the  suffix  ;  nowadays  his- 
torians try  to  be  more  '  correct  '  and  prefer  the  adjective  carolin- 
gien,  which  was  iinknown  to  Littre.  Oligarchy  is  olig  +  archy,  but  for 
the  opposite  notion  the  word  p  oligarchy  or  polygarchy  was  framed 
from  poly  and  the  last  two  syllables  of  oli-garchy,  and  though  now 
scholars  have  made  polyarchy  the  usual  form,  the  word  with  the 
intrusive  g  was  the  common  form  two  hundred  years  ago  in  English, 
and  corresponding  forms  are  found  in  French,  Spanish  and  other 
languages.  Judgmatical  is  made  on  the  pattern  of  dogmatical, 
though  there  the  stem  is  dogmat-.  In  jocular  German  schwach- 
matikus  '  valetudinarian,'  we  have  the  same  suffix  Avith  a 
different  colouring,  taken  from  rheumatikus  (thus  also  Dan. 
svagmatiker).  Swift  does  not  hesitate  to  speak  of  a  sextumvirate, 
which  suggests  triumvirate  better  than  sexvirate  would  have  done  ; 
and  Bernard  Shaw  once  writes  "  his  equipage  (or  autopage)  " — 
evidently  starting  from  the  popular,  but  erroneous,  belief  that 
equipage  is  derived  from  Lat.  equus  and  then  dividing  the  word 
equi  +  page.  Cf.  Scillonian  from  Scilly  on  account  of  Devoniaji 
as  if  this  were  Dev  +  onian  instead   of  Devon  -f  ian. 


388     ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS   [en.  xix 

XIX.— §  15.  Tainting  of  Suflaxes. 

It  will  be  seen  that  in  some  of  these  instances  the  suffix  has 
appropriated  to  itself  not  only  part  of  the  sound  of  the  stem,  but 
also  part  of  its  signification.  This  is  seen  very  clearly  in  the  case 
of  dmndelier,  in  French  formed  from  chandelle  '  candle  '  with  the 
suffix  -ier,  of  rather  vague  signification,  '  anything  connected  with, 
or  ha\ang  to  do  with  ' ;  in  English  the  word  is  used  for  a  hanging 
branched  frame  to  hold  a  number  of  lights  ;  consequently  a  similar 
apparatus  for  gas-burners  was  denominated  gaselier  {gasalier, 
gasoUer),  and  with  the  introduction  of  electricity  the  formation 
has  even  been  extended  to  electrolier.  Vegetarian  is  from  the  stem 
veget-  with  added  -ari-an,  which  ending  has  no  special  connexion 
with  the  notion  of  eating  or  food,  but  recently  we  have  seen  the 
new  words  fruitarian  and  nutarian,  meaning  one  whose  food  consists 
(exclusively  or  chiefly)  in  fruits  and  nuts.  Cf.  solemncholy,  which 
according  to  PajTie  is  in  use  in  Alabama,  framed  evidently  on 
melancholy,  analj^zed  in  a  way  not  approved  bj^  Greek  scholars. 
The  whole  ending  of  septentrionalis  (from  the  name  of  the  constella- 
tion Septem  triones,  the  seven  oxen)  is  used  to  form  the  opposite  : 
meridi-onalis. 

A  similar  case  of  '  tainting  '  is  found  in  recent  English.  The 
NED,  in  the  article  on  the  suffix  -eer,  remarks  that  "  in  many  of 
the  words  so  formed  there  is  a  more  or  less  contemptuous  implica- 
tion," but  does  not  explain  this,  and  has  not  remarked  that  it  is 
found  only  in  words  ending  in  -teer  (from  words  in  -t).  I  think 
this  contemptuous  implication  starts  from  garreteer  and  crotcheteer 
(perhaps  also  pamphleteer  and  privateer) ;  after  these  were  formed 
the  disparaging  words  sonneteer,  pulpiteer.  During  the  war  (1916, 
I  think)  the  additional  word  profiteer  ^  came  into  use,  but  did  not 
find  its  way  into  the  dictionaries  till  1919  (Cassell's).  And  only 
the  other  day  I  read  in  an  American  publication  a  new  word  of 
the  same  calibre  :  "  Against  patrioteering ,  against  fraud  and  violence 
.  .  .  JVIr.  Mencken  has  always  nobly  and  bravely  contended." 

XIX.— §  16.  The  Classifying  Instinct. 

Man  is  a  classifying  animal :  in  one  sense  it  ma}^  be  said  that  the 
whole  process  of  spealdng  is  nothing  but  distributing  phenomena, 

1  Cf.  Lloyd  George's  speech  at  Dundee  (The  Times,  July  6,  1917):  '*  The 
Government  will  not  permit  the  burdens  of  the  country  to  be  increased 
by  what  is  called  '  profiteering.'  Although  I  have  been  criticized  for 
using  that  word,  I  believe  on  the  whole  it  is  a  rather  good  one.  It  is  profit- 
eer-ing  as  distinguished  from  profit-ing.  Profiting  is  fair  recompense  for 
services  rendered,  either  in  production  or  distribution  ;  profiteering  is  an 
extravagant  recompense  given  for  services  rendered.  I  believe  that  unfair 
in  peace.     In  war  it  is  an  outrage." 


§16]  THE   CLASSIFYING   INSTINCT  389 

of  which  no  two  arc  alike  in  every  respect,  into  different  classes  on 
the  strength  of  perceived  similarities  and  dissimilarities.  In  the 
name-giving  process  we  witness  the  same  ineradicable  and  very  use- 
ful tendency  to  see  likenesses  and  to  express  similarity  in  the  pheno- 
mena through  similarity  in  name.  Professor  Hempl  told  me  that 
one  of  his  little  daughters,  when  they  had  a  black  kitten  which 
was  called  Nig  (short  for  Nigger),  immediately  christened  a  gray 
kitten  Grig  and  a  bro^\^l  one  Brownig.  Here  we  see  the  genesis 
of  a  suffix  through  a  natural  process,  which  has  little  in  common 
with  the  gradual  weakening  of  an  originally  independent  word, 
as  in  -hood  and  the  other  instances  mentioned  above.  In  children's 
speech  similar  instances  are  not  unfrequent  (cf.  Ch.  VII  §  5)  ; 
Meringer  L  148  mentions  a  child  of  1.7  who  had  the  following 
forms  :  aiign,  ogn,  agn,  for  '  augen,  ohren,  haare.'  How  many  words 
formed  or  transformed  in  the  same  way  must  we  require  in  order 
to  speak  of  a  suffix  ?  Shall  we  recognize  one  in  Romanic  leve, 
greve  (cf.  Fr.  grief),  which  took  the  place  of  leve,  grave  ?  Here, 
as  Schuchardt  aptly  remarks,  it  was  not  only  the  opposite  signi- 
fication, but  also  the  fact  that  the  words  were  frequently  uttered 
shortlj'-  after  one  another,  that  made  one  word  influence  the  other. 

The  classifying  instinct  often  manifests  itself  in  bringing  words 
together  in  form  which  have  something  in  common  as  regards 
signification.  In  this  way  we  have  smaller  classes  and  larger 
classes,  and  sometimes  it  is  impossible  for  us  to  say  in  what  way 
the  likeness  in  form  has  come  about :  we  can  only  state  the  fact  that 
at  a  given  time  the  words  in  question  have  a  more  or  less  close 
resemblance.  But  in  other  cases  it  is  easy  to  see  which  word  of 
the  group  has  influenced  the  others  or  some  other.  In  the  examples 
I  am  about  to  give,  I  have  been  more  concerned  to  bring  together 
words  that  exhibit  the  classifying  tendency  than  to  try  to  find  out 
the  impetus  which  directed  the  formation  of  the  several  groups. 

In  OE.  we  have  some  names  of  animals  in  -gga  :  frogga,  stugga, 
docga,  wicga,  now  frog,  stag,  dog,  loig.  Savour  and  flavour  go 
together,  the  latter  (OFr.  flaur)  having  its  v  from  the  former. 
Groin,  I  suppose,  has  its  diphthong  from  loin ;  the  older  form  was 
grine,  grynd(e).  Claw,  paw  (earlier  powe,  OFr.  'pol).  Rim,  brim. 
Hook,  nook.  Gruff,  rough  {tough,  bluff,  huff— miff,  tiff,  whiff).  Fleer, 
leer,  jeer.  Tivig,  sprig.  Munch,  crunch  {lunch).  Without  uttering 
or  muttering  a  ivord.  The  trees  were  loiiped  and  toitped.  In  old 
Gothonic  the  word  for  '  eye  '  has  got  its  vowel  from  the  word 
for  '  ear,'  with  which  it  was  frequently  collocated :  augo{n), 
auso{n),  but  in  the  modern  languages  the  two  words  have  again 
been  separated  in  their  phonetic  development.  In  French  I 
suspect  that  popular  instinct  will  class  the  words  air,  terre,  mer 
together  as  names  of  what  used  to  be  termed  the  '  elements,'  in 


390    ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS  [ch.  xix 

spite  of  the  different  spelling  and  origin  of  the  sounds.  In  Russian 
koQot''  '  griffe  '  (claw),  nogot''  '  ongle  '  (fingernail),  and  hkoV 
'  coiide  '  (elbow),  three  names  of  parts  of  the  body,  go  together  in 
flexion  and  accent  (Boyer  et  Speranski,  Manuel  de  la  I.  russe  33). 
So  do  in  Latin  calez  '  gnat '  and  jmlex  '  flea.'  Atrox,  feror.  A 
great  many  examples  have  been  collected  by  M.  Bloomfield,  "  On 
Adaptation  of  Suffixes  in  Congeneric  Classes  of  Substantives  " 
{Am.  Journal  of  Philol.  XII,  1891),  from  which  I  take  a  few.  A 
considerable  number  of  designations  of  parts  of  the  body  were 
formed  with  heteroclitic  declension  as  r-n  stems  (cf.  above,  XVIII 
§  2):  'liver,'  Or.  hepar,  hepatos,  'udder,'  Gr.  outhar,  authatos, 
'  thigh,'  Lat.  femur,  feminis,  further  Aryan  names  for  blood,  wing, 
viscera,  excrement,  etc.  Other  designations  of  parts  of  the  body 
w^ere  partly  assimilated  to  this  class,  having  also  n  stems  in  the 
oblique  cases,  though  their  nominative  was  formed  in  a  different  w  ay . 
Words  for  '  right '  and  '  left '  frequently  influence  one  another 
and  adopt  the  same  ending,  and  so  do  opposites  generally : 
Bloomfield  explains  the  t  in  the  Gothonic  word  corresponding  to 
E.  white,  where  from  Sanskr.  we  should  expect  th,  Qveta,  as  due  to 
the  word  for  '  black  '  ;  Goth,  hweits,  swaris,  ON.  hvitr,  svartr,  etc. 
A  great  many  names  of  birds  and  other  animals  appear  with  the 
same  ending,  Gr.  cjlaux  '  owl,'  kokkux  '  cuckoo,'  korax  '  crow,'  ortux 
'  quail,'  aix  '  goat,'  alopex  '  fox,'  bomhux '  silkworm,'  lunx  '  lynx  '  and 
many  others,  also  some  plant-names.  Names  for  winter,  summer, 
day,  evening,  etc.,  also  to  a  great  extent  form  groups.  In  a  subse- 
quent article  (in  IF  vi.  60  ff.)  Bloomfield  pursues  the  same  line  of 
thought  and  explains  likenesses  in  various  words  of  related  signi- 
fication, in  direct  opi30sition  to  the  current  explanation  through 
added  root-determinatives,  as  due  to  blendings  (cf.  above,  Ch.  XVII 
§  0).  In  Latin  the  inchoative  value  of  the  verbs  in  -esco  is  due 
to  the  accidentally  inherent  continuous  character  of  a  few  verbs 
of  the  class  :  adolesco,  senesco,  cresco ;  but  the  same  suffix  is  also 
found  in  the  oldest  words  for  '  asking,  wishing,  searching,'  re- 
tained in  E.  ask,  loish,  G.  forsclien,  which  thus  become  a  small 
group  linked  together  by  form  and  meaning  alike. 

XIX.— §  17.  Character  of  Suffixes. 

There  seems  undoubtedly  to  be  something  accidental  or  hap- 
hazard in  most  of  these  transferences  of  sounds  from  one  \Aord 
to  another  through  which  groups  of  phonetically  and  scmantically 
similar  words  are  created  ;  the  process  works  misystematically, 
or  rather,  it  consists  in  spasmodic  efforts  at  regularizing  something 
which  is  from  the  start  utterly  unsystematic.  But  where  condi- 
tions are  favourable,  i.e.  where  the  notional  connexion  is  patent 


§17]  CHARACTER   OF  SUFFIXES  891 

and  the  phonetic  element  is  such  that  it  can  easily  be  added  to  many 
words,  the  group  will  tend  constantly  to  grow  larger  within  the 
natural  boundaries  given  by  the  common  resemblance  in  signification. 
I  have  no  doubt  that  the  vast  majority  of  our  formatives,  such 
as  suffixes  and  flexional  endings,  have  arisen  in  this  way  through 
transference  of  some  part,  which  at  first  was  unmeaning  in  itself, 
from  one  word  to  another  in  which  it  had  originally  no  business, 
and  then  to  another  and  another,  taking  as  it  were  a  certain  colouring 
from  the  words  in  which  it  is  found,  and  gradually  acquiring  a  more 
or  less  independent  signification  or  function  of  its  own.  In  long 
words,  such  as  were  probably  frequent  in  primitive  speech,  and  which 
were  to  the  minds  of  the  speakers  as  unanalyzable  as  marmalade 
or  crocodile  is  to  Englishmen  nowadays,  it  would  be  perhaps  most 
natural  to  keep  the  beginning  unchanged  and  to  modify  the  final 
syllable  or  syllables  to  bring  about  conformity  with  some  word 
with,  which  it  was  associated  ;  hence  the  prevalence  of  suffixes  in 
our  languages,  hence  also  the  less  systematic  character  of  these 
suffixes  as  compared  with  the  prefixes,  most  of  which  have  origin- 
ated in  independent  Avords,  such  as  adverbs.  What  is  from  the 
merely  phonetic  jjoint  of  view  the  '  same  '  suffix,  in  different  lan- 
guages may  have  the  greatest  variety  of  meaning,  sometimes  no 
discernible  meaning  at  all,  and  it  is  in  many  cases  utterly  imjDossible 
to  find  out  why  in  one  particular  language  it  can  be  used  with  one 
stem  and  not  with  another.  Anyone  going  through  the  collections 
in  Brugmann's  great  Grammar  will  be  struck  with  this  purely 
accidental  character  of  the  use  of  most  of  the  suffixes — a  fact 
which  would  be  simply  unthinkable  if  each  of  them  bad  originally 
one  definite,  well -determined  signification,  but  which  is  easy  to 
account  for  on  the  hypothesis  here  adopted.  And  then  many  of 
them  are  not  added  to  ready-made  words  or  '  roots,'  but  form 
one  indivisible  whole  with  the  initial  part  of  the  word  ;  cf.,  for 
instance,  the  suffix  -le  in  English  squabble,  struggle,  ivriggle,  babble, 
mumble,  bustle,  etc. 

XIX.— §  18.  Brugmann's  Theory  of  Gender. 

As  I  have  said,  man  is  a  classifAnng  animal,  and  in  his  language 
tends  to  express  outwardly  class  distinctions  which  he  feels  more 
or  less  vaguely.  One  of  the  most  important  of  these  class  di\4sions, 
and  at  the  same  time  one  of  the  most  difficult  to  explain,  is  that  of 
the  three  '  genders  '  in  our  Aryan  languages.  If  we  are  to  believe 
Brusmann,  we  have  here  a  case  of  what  I  have  in  this  work  termed 
secretion.  In  his  well-known  paper,  "  Das  Nominalgeschlecht 
in  den  indogermanischen  Sprachen  "  (in  Techmer's  Zs.  f.  allgem. 
Sprachwissensch.  4.  100  ff.,  cf.  also  his  reply  to  Roethe's  criticism, 


392     ORIGIN  OF  GRAM3IATICAL  ELEMENTS    [cii.  xix 

PBB  15.  522)  he  puts  the  question  :  How  did  it  come  about  that 
the  old  Arj'ans  attached  a  definite  gender  (or  sex,  gepchlecht)  to 
words  meaning  foot,  head,  house,  town,  Gr.  po^^s,  for  instance, 
being  mascuHne,  kepJiale  feminine,  oikos  masculine,  and  polis 
feminine  ?  The  generally  accepted  explanation,  according  to  ^\hich 
the  imagination  of  mankind  looked  upon  lifeless  things  as  living 
beings,  is,  Brugmann  says,  unsatisfactory ;  the  masculine  and 
feminine  of  grammatical  gender  are  merely  unmeaning  forms  and 
have  nothing  to  do  with  the  ideas  of  masculinity  and  femininity  ; 
for  even  where  there  exists  a  natural  difference  of  sex,  language 
often  employs  only  one  gender.  So  in  German  we  have  der  hase, 
die  mans,  and  der  weibliche  liase  is  not  felt  to  be  self -contradictory. 
Again,  in  the  historj'  of  languages  we  often  find  words  which  change 
their  gender  exclusively  on  account  of  their  form.  Thus,  in  German, 
many  words  in  -e,  such  as  traube,  niere,  wade,  wliich  were  formerly 
masculine,  have  now  become  feminine,  because  the  great  majority 
of  substantives  in  -e  are  feminine  {erde,  elire,  farbe,  etc.).  Nothing 
accordingly  hinders  us  from  supposing  that  grammatical  gender 
originally  had  nothing  at  all  to  do  with  natural  sex.  The  cpiestion, 
therefore,  according  to  Brugmann,  is  essentially  reduced  to  this  : 
How  did  it  come  to  pass  that  the  suffix  -a  was  used  to  designate 
female  beings  ?  At  first  it  had  no  connexion  with  femininity,  wit- 
ness Lat.  aqua  '  water  '  and  hundreds  of  other  words  ;  but  among 
the  old  words  with  that  ending  there  happened  to  be  some  denoting 
females  :  mama  '  mother  '  and  gena  '  woman  '  (compare  E.  quean, 
queen).  Now,  in  the  history  of  some  suffixes  we  see  that,  without 
any  regard  to  their  original  etymological  signification,  they  may 
adopt  something  of  the  radical  meaning  of  the  words  to  \Ahich 
they  are  added,  and  transfer  that  meaning  to  new  formations.  In 
this  way  mama  and  gena  became  the  starting-point  for  analogical 
formations,  as  if  the  idea  of  female  was  denoted  by  the  ending, 
and  new  words  were . f oi^med,  e.g.  Lat.  dea  'goddess'  from  dens 
'  god,'  equa  '  mare  '  from  eqims  '  horse,'  etc.  The  suffix  -ie-  or  -i- 
probably  came  to  denote  feminine  sex  by  a  similar  process,  possibly 
from  Skr.  strl  '  woman,"  which  may  have  given  a  fem.  *iilql  '  she- 
wolf  '  to  *n-lqos  '  wolf.'  The  above  is  a  summary  of  Brugmann's 
reasoning  ;  it  may  interest  the  reader  to  know  that  a  closely  similar 
point  of  view  had,  several  years  pre\aously,  been  taken  by  a  far- 
seeing  scholar  in  respect  to  a  totally  different  language,  namely 
Hottentot,  where,  according  to  Blcek,  CG  2.  118-22,  202-9.  a 
class  division  which  had  originally  nothing  to  do  with  sex  has 
been  employed  to  distinguish  natural  sex.  I  transcribe  a  few  of 
Bleek's  remarks  :  "  The  apparent  sex-denoting  character  which 
the  classification  of  the  nouns  now  has  in  the  Hottentot  language 
was  evidently  imparted  to  it  after  a  division  of  the  nouns  into 


§18]   BRUGMANN'S  THEORY  OF  GENDER    893 

classes  ^  had  taken  place.  It  probably  arose,  in  the  first  instance, 
from  the  possibly  accidental  circumstance  that  the  nouns  indica- 
ting (respectiveh^)  man  and  woman  were  formed  with  different 
derivative  suffixes,  and  consequently  belonged  to  different  classes 
(or  genders)  of  nouns,  and  that  these  sufTixes  thus  began  to  indicate 
the  distinction  of  sex  in  nouns  where  it  could  be  distinguished  " 
(p.  122).  "To  assume,  for  example,  that  the  sulTfix  of  the  m.  sg. 
(-p)  had  originally  the  meaning  of  '  man,'  or  the  fem.  sg.  (-s) 
that  of  '  woman,'  \\ould  in  no  way  explain  the  peculiar  division 
of  the  nouns  into  classes  as  we  find  it  in  Hottentot,  and  would  be 
opposed  to  all  that  is  probable  regarding  the  etymology  of  these 
suffixes,  and  also  to  the  fact  that  so  many  nouns  are  included  in 
the  sex-denoting  classes  to  which  the  distinction  of  sex  can  only 
be  applied  by  a  great  effort.  ...  If  the  word  for  '  man  '  were 
formed  with  one  suffix  (-p),  and  the  word  indicating  '  woman  ' 
(be  it  accidentally  or  not)  by  another  (-5),  then  other  nouns  would 
be  formed  with  the  same  suffixes,  in  analogy  with  these,  until 
the  majority  of  the  nouns  of  each  sex  were  formed  with  certain 
suffixes  which  would  thus  assume  a  sex-denoting  character  "  (p.  298), 
Brugmann's  view  on  Aryan  gender  has  not  been  unchallenged. 
The  weakest  points  in  his  arguments  are,  of  course,  that  there  are 
so  few  old  naturally  feminine  words  in  -a  and  -i  to  take  as  starting- 
points  for  such  a  thoroughgoing  modification  of  the  grammatical 
sj'stem,  and  that  Brugmann  was  unable  to  give  any  striking  ex- 
planation of  the  concord  of  adjectives  and  pronouns  with  words 
that  had  not  these  endings,  but  w^hich  were  nevertheless  treated  as 
masculines  and  feminines  respectively  It  would  lead  us  too  far 
here  f  o  give  any  minute  account  of  the  discussion  which  arose  on 
these  points  ;  ^  one  of  the  most  valuable  contributions  seems  to 
me  Jacobi's  suggestion  {Comjpositum  u.  Nebensatz,  1897,  115  ff.) 
that  the  origin  of  grammatical  gender  is  not  to  be  sought  in  the 
noun,  but  in  the  pronoun  (he  finds  a  parallel  in  the  Dravidian 
languages) — but  even  he  does  not  find  a  fully  satisfactory  explana- 
tion, and  the  Aryan  gender  distinction  reaches  back  to  so  remote 
an  antiquity,  thousands  of  years  before  any  literary  tradition,  that 
we  shall  most  probably  never  be  able  to  fathom  all  its  m5^steries. 
Of  late  years  less  attention  has  been  given  to  the  problem  of  the 
feminine,  which  presented  itself  to  Brugmann,  than  to  the  distinc- 
tion between  two  classes,  one  of  which  was  characterized  by  the 

^  Bleek  is  here  thinking  of  classes  like  those  of  the  Bantu  languages, 
which  have  nothing  to  do  with  sex. 

*  For  bibliography  and  criticism  see  Wheeler  in  Journ.  of  Germ.  Philol. 
2.  628  ff.,  and  especially  Josselin  de  Jong  in  Tijdschr.  v.  Ned.  Taal-  en  Letterk. 
29.  21  fi.,  and  the  same  writer's  thesis  De  Waardeerlngsonderscheiding  van 
levend  en  levenloos  iyi  het  Indogermaansch,  vergel.  m.  hetzelfde  verschijnsel  i7i 
Algonkin-kden  (Leiden,  1913).     Cf,  also  Hirt  GDS  45  ff. 


394     ORIGIN  OF  GRAMMATICAL  ELEMENTS   [ch.  xix 

use  of  a  nominative  in  -s,  wliich  is  now  looked  upon  as  a  '  transi- 
tive-active '  case,  and  the  other  by  no  ending  or  by  an  ending 
-m,  vvFiieh  is  the  same  as  was  used  as  the  accusative  in  the  first 
class  (an  '  intransitive-passive  '  case),  and  an  attempt  has  been 
made  to  see  in  the  distinction  something  analogous  to  the  division 
found  in  Algonkin  languages  between  a  class  of  '  living '  and 
another  of  '  lifeless  '  things — though  these  two  terms  are  not  to  be 
taken  in  the  strictly  scientific  sense,  for  primitive  men  do  not  reason 
in  the  same  way  as  we  do,  but  ascribe  or  deny  '  life  '  to  things 
according  to  criteria  which  we  have  great  difficult}'  in  apprehending. 
This  would  mean  a  twofold  division  into  one  class  comprising  the 
historical  masculines  and  feminines,  and  another  comprising  the 
neuters. 

As  to  the  feminine,  we  saw  two  old  endings  characterizing  that 
gender,  a  and  i.  With  regard  to  the  latter,  I  venture  to  throw 
out  the  suggestion  that  it  is  connected  with  diminutive  suffixes 
containing  that  vowel  in  various  languages  :  on  the  whole,  the 
sound  [i]  has  a  natural  affinity  with  the  notion  of  small,  slight, 
insignificant  and  weak  (sec  Ch.  XX  §  8).  In  some  African  languages 
we  find  two  classes,  one  comprising  men  and  big  things,  and  the 
other  women  and  small  things  (jMeinhof,  Die  Sprachen  der  Hamiten 
23),  and  there  is  nothing  unnatural  in  the  supposition  that  similar 
views  may  have  obtained  with  om"  ancestors.  This  would  naturally 
account  for  Skr.  vrk-i  '  she-wolf  '  (orig.  little  wolf,  '  wolfy  ')  from 
Skr.  irJcas,  napt-i,  Lat.  neptis,  G.  nichte,  Skr.  dev-i  '  goddess,'  etc. 
But  the  feminine  -a  is  to  me  just  as  enigmatic  as,  say,  the  d  of 
the  old  ablative 


XIX.— §  19.  Final  Considerations. 

The  ending  -a  serves  to  denote  not  only  female  beings,  but 
also  abstracts,  and  if  in  later  usage  it  is  also  applied  to  males,  as 
in  Latin  nauta  'sailor,'  auriga  'charioteer,'  this  is  only  a  derived 
use  of  the  abstracts  denoting  an  actiWty,  sailoring,  driving,  etc., 
just  as  G.  die  wache,  besides  the  activity  of  watching,  comes  to 
mean  the  man  on  guard,  or  asjuslice  (Sp.  eljusticia)  conaes  to  mean 
'  judge.'  The  original  sense  of  Antonius  collega  fait  Ciceronis 
was  '  A.  was  the  co-election  of  C  (Osthoff,  Verbum  in  d.  Nominal- 
compos.,  1878,  263  ff.,  Delbriick,  Syni.  Forsch.  4.  6). 

The  same  -a  is  finally  used  as  the  plural  ending  of  most  neuters, 
but.  as  is  now  universally  admitted  (see  cspeciallj'  Johannes  Schmidt, 
Die  Pluralbildungen  der  iiuiogerm.  Netitra,  1889),  the  ending  here 
was  originally  neither  neuter  nor  plural,  but,  on  the  contrary, 
feminine  and  singular.  The  forms  in  -a  are  properly  collective 
formations  like  those  found,  for  instance,  in  Lat.  opera,  gen.  opercB, 


§19]  FINAL  CONSIDERATIONS  895 

'  work,'  comp.  opus  '  (a  piece  of)  work' ;  Lat.  terra  '  earth,'  comp. 
Oscan  terinn  '  plot  of  ground  '  ;  pugna  '  boxing,  fight,'  comp. 
pugnus  '  fist.'  This  explains  among  other  things  the  peculiar 
s^Titactic  phenomenon,  which  is  found  regularly  in  Greek  and 
sporadically  in  Sanskrit  and  other  languages,  that  a  neuter  plural 
subject  takes  the  verb  in  the  singular.  Greek  toxa  is  often  used 
in  speaking  of  a  single  bow  ;  and  the  Latin  poetic  use  of  guttura, 
colla,  ora,  where  only  one  person's  throat,  neck  or  face  is  meant, 
points  similarly  to  a  period  of  the  past  when  these  words  did  not 
denote  the  plural.  We  can  now  see  the  reason  of  this  -a  being 
in  some  cases  also  the  plural  sign  of  masculine  substantives  : 
Lat.  loca  from  locus,  joca  from  jocus,  etc.  ;  Gr.  sita  from  sitos. 
Joh.  Schmidt  refers  to  similar  plural  formations  in  Arabic  ;  and  as 
we  have  seen  (Ch.  XIX  §  9),  the  Bantu  plural  prefixes  had  probably 
a  similar  origin.  And  we  are  thus  constantly  reminded  that  lan- 
guages must  often  make  the  most  curious  detours  to  arrive  at  a 
grammatical  expression  for  things  which  appear  to  us  so  self-evident 
as  the  difference  between  he  and  she,  or  that  between  one  and 
more  than  one.  Expressive  simplicity'  in  linguistic  structure 
is  not  a  primitive,  but  a  derived  qualitj'. 


CHAPTER  XX 
SOUND    SYMBOLISM 

§  1.  Sound  and  Sense.  §  2.  Instinctive  Feeling.  §  3.  Direct  Imitation. 
§  4.  Originator  of  tlie  Sound.  §  5.  Movement.  §  6.  Things  and 
Appearances.  §  7.  States  of  Mind.  §  8.  Size  and  Distance.  §  9. 
Length  and  Strength  of  Words  and  Sounds.  §  10.  General  Con- 
siderations. §  11.  Importance  of  Suggestiveness.  §  12.  Ancient  and 
Modern  Times. 

XX.— §  1.  Sound  and  Sense. 

The  idea  that  there  is  a  natural  correspondence  bet\\een  sound 
and  sense,  and  that  -words  acquire  their  contents  and  value  through 
a  certain  sound  symbolism,  has  at  all  times  been  a  favourite  one 
with  linguistic  dilettanti,  the  best-known  examples  being  found 
in  Plato's  Kratylos.  Greek  and  Latin  grammarians  indulge  in 
the  wildest  hypotheses  to  explain  the  natural  origin  of  such  and 
such  a  word,  as  when  Nigidius  Figulus  said  that  in  pronouncing 
vos  one  puts  forward  one's  lips  and  sends  out  breath  in  the  direction 
of  the  other  person,  while  this  is  not  the  case  with  nos.  With 
these  early  wiiters,  to  make  guesses  at  sound  sj-mbohsm  was  the 
only  way  to  et3''mologize  ;  no  wonder,  therefore,  that  we  with 
our  historical  methods  and  our  wider  range  of  knowledge  find 
most  of  their  explanations  ridiculous  and  absurd.  But  this  does 
not  justify  us  in  rejecting  any  idea  of  sound  sjTnbolism  :  abusus 
non  tollit  usum  ! 

Humboldt  (Versch  79)  says  that  "  language  chooses  to  designate 
objects  by  sounds  which  partly  in  themselves,  partly  in  comparison 
with  others,  produce  on  the  ear  an  impiession  resembling  the  effect 
of  the  object  on  the  mind  ;  thus  stehen,  stdtig,  starr,  the  impression 
of  firmness,  Sanskrit  U  '  to  melt,  diverge,'  that  of  liquidity  or 
solution  (des  zerfliessenden).  ...  In  this  way  objects  that 
produce  similar  impressions  are  denoted  by  words  with  essentially 
the  same  sounds,  thus  wehen,  ivind,  uvlke,  ivirren,  u-nnsch,  in  all 
of  which  the  vacillating,  wavering  motion  with  its  confused  im- 
pression on  the  senses  is  expressed  through  .  .  .  u\"  MacUdg's 
objection  (1842,  13  =  Kl  64)  that  we  need  only  compare  four  of 
the  words  Humboldt  quotes  with  the  corresponding  words  in  the 
very   nearest   sister-language,  Danish  blcese,  vind,  sky,  <cnske,  to 

396 


§1]  SOUND  AND   SENSE  897 

see  how  wrong  this  is,  seems  to  me  a  Httle  cheap  :  Humboldt 
himself  expressly  assumes  that  much  of  primitive  sound  symbolism 
may  have  disappeared  in  course  of  time  and  warns  us  against 
making  this  kind  of  explanation  a  '  constitutive  principle,' 
wliich  would  lead  to  great  dangers  ("so  setzt  man  sich  grossen 
gefabren  aus  und  verfolgt  einen  in  jeder  riicksicht  scliliipfrigen 
pfad  ").  Moreover  bl<xse  (E.  bloic,  Lat.  flare)  is  just  as  imitative 
as  tcind,  vind  :  no  one  of  course  would  pretend  that  there  was 
only  one  way  of  expressing  the  same  sense  perception.  Among 
Humboldt's  examples  icolke  and  unnsch  are  doubtful,  but  I  do 
not  see  that  this  affects  the  general  truth  of  his  contention  that 
there  is  something  like  sound  symbolism  in  some  words. 

NjTop  in  his  treatment  of  this  question  (Gr  I.V  §  545  f.)  repeats 
Madvig's  objection  that  the  same  name  can  denote  various  objects, 
that  the  same  object  can  be  called  by  different  names,  and  that 
the  significations  of  words  are  constantly  changing  ;  fvn-ther,  that 
the  same  gi'oup  of  sounds  comes  to  mean  different  things  according 
to  the  language  in  which  it  occurs.  He  finally  exclaims  :  "  How 
to  explain  [by  means  of  sound  symbolism]  the  difference  in 
signification  between  mums,  nurus,  durus,  fwus,  etc.  1  " 

XX.— §  2.  Instinctive  Feeling. 

Yes,  of  course  it  would  be  absm'd  to  maintain  that  all  words 
at  all  times  in  all  languages  had  a  signification  corresponding 
exactly  to  their  sounds,  each  sound  having  a  definite  meaning 
once  for  all.  But  is  there  really  much  more  logic  in  the  opposite 
extreme,  which  denies  any  kind  of  sound  symbolism ^  {apart  from 
the  small  class  of  evident  echoisms  or  '  onomatopoeia  ')  and  sees 
in  our  words  only  a  collection  of  Avholly  accidental  and  irrational 
associations  of  sound  and  meaning  ?  It  seems  to  me  that  the 
conclusion  in  this  case  is  as  false  as  if  you  were  to  infer  that  because 
on  one  occasion  X  told  a  lie,  he  therefore  never  tells  the  truth. 
The  correct  conclusion  would  be  :  as  he  has  told  a  lie  once,  we 
cannot  always  trust  him  ;  we  must  be  on  our  guard  with  him — 
but  sometimes  he  may  tell  the  truth.  Thus,  also,  sounds  may  in 
some  cases  be  symbolic  of  their  sense,  even  if  they  are  not  so  in 
all  words.  If  linguistic  historians  are  averse  to  admitting  sound 
symbolism,  this  is  a  natural  consequence  of  their  being  chiefly 
occupied  with  words  which  have  undergone  regular  changes  in 
sound  and  sense ;  and  most  of  the  words  which  form  the 
staple  of  linguistic  books  arc  outside  the  domain  of  sound 
sj'^mbolism. 

^  "  Inner  and  essential  connexion  between  idea  and  word  .  .  .  there 
is  none,  in  any  language  upon  earth,"  saj's  Whitney  L  32. 


898  SOUND   SYMBOLISM  [cii.  xx 

There  is  no  denying,  however,  that  there  are  words  which  we 
feel  instinctively  to  be  adequate  to  express  the  ideas  they  stand 
for,  and  others  the  sounds  of  which  are  felt  to  be  more  or  less 
incongruous  with  their  signification.  Future  linguists  will  have 
to  find  out  in  detail  what  domains  of  human  thought  admit,  and 
what  domains  do  not  admit,  of  congruous  expression  through 
speech  sounds,  and  further  what  sounds  are  suitable  to  express 
such  and  such  a  notion,  for  though  it  is  clear — to  take  onl}'  a  few 
examples — that  there  is  little  to  choose  between  apple  and  pomme, 
or  between  window  and  fenster,  as  there  is  no  sound  or  sound  group 
that  has  any  natural  affinitj''  with  such  thoroughly  concrete  and 
composite  ideas  as  those  expressed  by  these  words,  j^et  on  the 
other  hand  everybody  must  feel  that  the  word  roll,  rouler,  rulle, 
rollen  is  more  adequate  than  the  corresponding  Russian  word 
kataV,  katiV. 

It  would  be  an  interesting  task  to  examine  in  detail  and 
systematically  what  ideas  lend  themselves  to  symbolic  presenta- 
tion and  what  sounds  are  chosen  for  them  in  different  languages. 
That,  however,  could  only  be  done  on  the  basis  of  many  more 
examples  than  I  can  find  space  for  in  this  work,  and  I  shall, 
therefore,  only  attempt  to  give  a  preliminary  enumeration  of  the 
most  obvious  classes,  with  a  small  fraction  of  the  examples  I  have 
collected.^ 


XX.— §  3.  Direct  Imitation. 

The  simplest  case  is  the  direct  imitation  of  the  sound,  thus 
clink,  dank,  ting,  tinkle  of  various  metallic  sounds,  splash,  bubble, 
sizz,  sizzle  of  sounds  produced  by  water,  bow-wow,  bleat,  roar  of 
sounds  produced  by  animals,  and  snort,  sneeze,  snir,ger,  smack, 
whisper,  grunt,  grumble  of  sounds  produced  by  human  beings. 
Examples  might  easily  be  multiplied  of  such  '  echoisms  '  or 
'  onomatopoeia  '  proper.  But,  as  our  speech-organs  are  not 
capable  of  giving  a  perfect  imitation  of  all  '  unarticulated  '  sounds, 
the  choice  of  speech-sounds  is  to  a  certain  extent  accidental,  and 
different  nations  ha\e  chosen  different  combinations,  more  or 
less  conventionalized,  for  the  same  sounds ;  thus  cock-a-doodle-doo, 
Dan.  kykeliky,  Sw.  kukeliku,  G.  kikeriki,  Fr.  coquelico,ioT  the  sound 
of  a  cock  ;  and  for  whisper  :  Dan.  hviske,  ON.  kvisa,  G.  fliistern, 
Fr.  chuchoter,  Sp.  susurar.  The  continuit}"-  of  a  sound  is  frequently 
indicated  by  Z  or  r  after  a  stopped  consonant :  rattle,  rumble,  jingle, 
clatter,  chatter,  jabber,  etc. 

^  I  have  learnt  very  little  from  the  discussion  which  followed  Wundt'a 
remarks  on  the  subject  (S  1.  312-347);  see  Delbnick  Grfr  78  £E.,  Siitterlin 
WSG  29  fi.,  Hilmer  Sch  10  ff. 


§4]  ORIGINATOR    OF  THE   SOUND  899 

XX.— §  4.  Originator  of  the  Sound. 

Next,  the  echoic  word  designates  the  being  that  produces  the 
sound,  thus  the  birds  cuckoo  and  peeweet  (Dan,  vibe,  G.  kibitz, 
Fr.  pop,  dix-huit). 

A  special  subdivision  of  particular  interest  comprises  those 
names,  or  nicknames,  which  are  sometimes  popularly  given  to 
nations  from  words  continually  occurring  in  their  speech.  Thus 
the  Fi'ench  used  to  call  an  Englishman  a  god-damn  (godon),  and  in 
China  an  English  soldier  is  called  a-says  or  I -says.  In  Java  a 
Frenchman  is  called  orang-deedong  (orang  '  man  '),  in  America 
ding-doyig,  and  during  the  Napoleonic  wars  the  French  were  called 
in  Spain  didones,  from  dis-donc  ;  another  name  for  the  same  nation 
is  ivi-wi  (Australia),  man-a-iciwi  (in  Beach-la-mar),  or  out-men 
(New  Caledonia).  In  Eleonore  Christine's  Jammersminde  83  I 
read,  "  Ich  habe  zwei  ^mrZe  mi  franQo  gefangen,"  and  correspond- 
ingly Goldsmith  ^vl'ites  (Globe  ed,  624)  :  "Damn  the  French,  the 
parle  vous,  and  all  that  belongs  to  them.  What  makes  the  bread 
rising  ?  the  parle  vous  that  devour  us."  In  Rovigno  the  sur- 
rounding Slavs  are  called  cuje  from  their  exclamation  cuje  '  listen, 
I  say,'  and  in  Hungary  German  visitors  are  called  vigec  (from 
ivie  ghVs  ?),  and  customs  officers  vartajnszli  (from  ivarV  a  bissl). 
Round  Panama  everything  native  is  called  spiggoty,  because  in  the 
early  days  the  Panamanians,  when  addressed,  used  to  reply,  "  No 
spiggoty  [speak]  Inglis,"  In  Yokohama  an  English  or  American 
sailor  is  called  Damuralsu  H'to  from  '  Damn  your  eyes  '  and 
Japanese  H'to  '  people.'  ^ 

XX.— §  5.  Movement. 

Thirdly,  as  sound  is  always  produced  by  some  movement  and 
is  nothing  but  the  impression  which  that  movement  makes  on  the 
ear,  it  is  quite  natural  that  the  movement  itself  may  be  expressed 
by  the  word  for  its  sound  :  the  two  are.  in  fact,  inseparable.  Note, 
for  instance,  such  verbs  as  bubble,  splash,  clash,  crack,  peck.  Human 
actions  may  therefore  be  denoted  by  such  words  as  to  bang  the 
door,  or  (with  slighter  sounds)  to  tap  or  rap  at  a  door.  Hence 
also  the  substantives  a  tap  or  a  rap  for  the  action,  but  the  sub- 
stantive may  also  come  to  stand  for  the  implement,  as  when  from 
the  verb  to  hack,  *  to  cut,  chop  off,  break  up  hard  earth,'  we  have 
the  noun  hack,  '  a  mattock  or  large  pick.' 

Then  we  have  words  expressive  of  such  movements  as  are  not 
to  the  same  extent  characterized  by  loud  sounds  ;  thus  a  great 

1  Schuchardt,  KS  5.  12,  Zs.  J.  rom.  Phil.  33.  458,  Churchill  B  53,  Sand- 
feld-Jensen,  Nationaljitlelsen  14,  Lentzner,  Col.  87,  Simonyi  US  157,  The 
Outlook,  January   1910,   New  Quarterly  Mag.,  July    1879. 


400  SOUND   SYMBOLISM  [cir.  xx 

many  words  beginning  with  ^-combinations,  fi-  :  flow,  flag  (Dan. 
flagre),  flake,  flutter,  flicker,  fling,  flit,  flurry,  flirt ;  si- :  slide,  slip, 
slive  ;  gl- :  glide.  Hence  adjectives  like  fleet,  slippery,  glib.  Sound 
and  sight  may  have  been  originall}'  combined  in  such  expressions 
for  an  uncertain  walk  as  totter,  dodder,  dialectical  teeter,  titter,  dither, 
but  in  cases  of  this  kind  the  audible  element  may  be  wanting,  and 
the  word  may  come  to  be  felt  as  symbolic  of  the  movement  as  such. 
This  is  also  the  case  with  many  exi^ressions  for  the  sudden,  rapid 
movement  by  which  we  take  hold  of  something  ;  as  a  short  vowel, 
suddenly  interrupted  by  a  stopped  consonant,  serves  to  express 
the  sound  produced  by  a  very  rapid  striking  movement  (pat,  tap, 
knock,  etc.),  similar  sound  combinations  occur  frequently  for  the 
more  or  less  noiseless  seizing  of  a  thing  (with  the  teeth  or  with 
the  hand) :  snap,  snack,  snatch,  catch,  Fr.  hajjper,  attraper,  gripper, 
E.  grip,  Dan.  hapse,  na2Jpe,  Lat.  capio,  Gr.  kapto,  Armenian  kap 
'  I  seize,'  Turk  kapmak  (mak  infin.  ending),  etc.  (I  shall  only 
mention  one  derivative  meaning  that  may  develop  from  this  group  : 

E.  sruick  '  a  hurried  meal,'  in  Swift's  time  called  a  S7iap  {Journ. 
to  Stella  270) ;  cf.   G.   schnapps,   Dan.  snaps   '  glass  of  spirits.') 

F.  chase  and  catch  are  both  derived  from  two  dialectically  different 
French  forms,  ultimately  going  back  to  the  same  late  Latin  verb 
captiare,  but  it  is  no  mere  accident  that  it  was  the  form  '  catch  ' 
that  acquired  the  meaning  '  to  seize,'  not  found  in  French,  for  it 
naturally  associated  itself  with  snatch,  and  especially''  with  the 
now  obsolete  verb  latch  '  to  seize.' 

There  is  also  a  natural  connexion  between  action  and  sound 
in  the  word  to  tickle,  G.  kiizeln,  ON.  kitla,  Dan.  kilde  (d  mute), 
Nubian  killi-kilU,  and  similar  forms  (Schuchardt,  Nubisch.  u. 
Bask.  9),  Lat.  titillare  ;  cp.  also  the  word  for  the  kind  of  laughter 
thus  produced  :  titter,  G.  kichern. 

XX.— §  6.  Things  and  Appearances. 

Further,  we  have  the  extension  of  s5^mbolical  designation  to 
things  ;  here,  too,  there  is  some  more  or  less  obvious  association 
of  what  is  only  visible  with  some  sound  or  sounds.  This  has  been 
specially  studied  by  Hilmer,  to  whose  book  (Sch)  the  reader  is 
referred  for  numerous  examples,  e.g.  p.  237  ff.,  knap  'a  thick  stick, 
a  knot  of  wood,  a  bit  of  food,  a  protuberance,  a  small  hill ;  knop 
'  a  boss,  stud,  button,  loiob,  a  wart,  pimple,  the  bud  of  a  flower, 
a  promontory,'  with  the  variants  knob,  kniip.  .  .  .  Hilmer's 
word-lists  from  German  and  English  comprise  170  pages  ! 

There  is  also  a  natural  association  between  high  tones  (sounds 
with  very  rapid  vibrations)  and  light,  and  inverselj'^  between  low 
tones  and  darkness,  as  is  seen  in  the  frequent  use  of  adjectives 


§6]  THINGS   AND  APPEARANCES  401 

like  *  light '  and  '  dark  '  in  speaking  of  notes.  Hence  the  vowel 
[i]  is  felt  to  be  more  appropriate  for  light,  and  [u]  for  dark,  as 
seen  most  clearly  in  the  contrast  between  gleam,  glimmer,  glitter 
on  the  one  hand  and  gloom  on  the  other  (Zangwill  somewhere 
writes  :  "  The  gloom  of  night,  relieved  only  by  the  gleam  from 
the  street-lamp  ")  ;  the  word  light  itself,  which  has  now  a  diphthong 
which  is  not  so  adequate  to  the  meaning,  used  to  have  the  vowel 
[i]  like  G.  Held ;  for  the  opposite  notions  we  have  such  words  as 
G.  dunkel,  Dan.  mulm,  Gr.  amolgds,  skdtos,  Lat.  obscurus,  and  with 
another  'dark'  vowel  E.  miirhj,  Dan.  mork. 

XX.— §  7.  States  o£  Mind. 

From  this  it  is  no  far  cry  to  words  for  corresponding  states 
of  mind  :  to  some  extent  the  very  same  words  are  used,  as  gloom 
(Dowden  ^vrites  :  "  The  good  news  was  needed  to  cast  a  gleam 
on  the  gloom  that  encompassed  Shelley ") ;  hence  also  glum, 
glumpy,  glumpish,  grumpy,  the  dumps,  sulky.  If  E.  moody  and 
sullen  have  changed  their  significations  (OE.  modig  'high-spirited,' 
ME.  solein  '  solitary '),  sound  sjTnbolism,  if  I  am  not  mistaken, 
counts  for  something  in  the  change ;  the  adjectives  now  mean  • 
exactly  the  same  as  Dan.  mut,  but. 

If  grumble  comes  to  mean  the  expression  of  a  mental  state  of 
dissatisfaction,  the  connexion  between  the  sound  of  the  word  and 
its  sense  is  even  more  direct,  for  the  verb  is  imitative  of  the  sound 
produced  in  such  moods,  cf.  mumble  and  grunt,  gruntle.  The 
name  of  Mrs.  Grundy  is  not  badly  chosen  as  a  representative  of 
narrow-minded  conventional  morality. 

A  long  list  might  be  given  of  symbolic  expressions  for  dislike, 
disgust,  or  scorn  ;  here  a  few  hints  only  can  find  place.  First  we 
have  the  same  dull  or  dump  (back)  vowels  as  in  the  last  paragraph  ; 
blunder,  bungle,  bung,  clumsy,  humdrum,  humbug,  strum,  slum, 
slush,  slubber,  sloven,  muck,  mud,  muddle,  mug  (various  words, 
but  all  full  of  contempt),  juggins  (a  silly  person),  numskull  (old 
numps,  nup,  nupson),  dunderhead,  gull,  scug  (at  Eton  a  dirty  or 
untidy  boy).  .  .  .  Many  words  begin  with  si-  (we  have  already 
seen  some) :  slight,  slim,  slack,  sly,  sloppy,  slipslop,  slubby,  slattern, 
slut,  slosh.  .  .  .  Initial  labials  are  also  frequent.^  After  the 
vowel  we  have  very  often  the  sound  [/]  or  [t/],  as  in  trash,  tosh, 
slosh,  botch,  patch ;  cf .  also  G.  kitsch  (bad  picture,  smearing), 
patsch{e)  (mire,  anything  worthless),  quatsch  (silly  nonsense), 
putsch  (riot,  political  coup  de  main).  E.  bosh  (nonsense)  is  said 
to  be  a  Turkish  loan-word ;  it  has  become  popular  for  the  same 

^  F,  for  instance,  in  fop,  Joozy,  Jogy,  fogram  (old),  all  of  them  more  or 
less  variants  of  fool. 

26 


402  SOUND   SYMBOLISM  [ch.  xx 

reason  for  which  the  French  nickname  boche  for  a  German  was 
widely  used  during  the  World  War.  Let  me  finally  mention  the 
It.  derivative  suffix  -accio,  as  in  j^overaccio  (miserable),  acqvaccia 
(bad  water),  and  -uccio,  as  in  cavalluccio  (vile  horse). 


XX. — §  8.  Size  and  Distance. 

The  vowel  [i],  especially  in  its  narrow  or  thin  variety,  is  par- 
ticularly appropriate  to  express  what  is  small,  weak,  insignificant, 
or,  on  the  other  hand,  refined  or  dainty.  It  is  found  in  a  great 
many  adjectives  in  various  languages,  e.g.  little,  petit,  piccolo, 
piccino,  Magy.  kis,  E.  wee,  tiny  (by  children  often  pronounced 
teeny  [ti'ni]),  slim,  Lat.  minor,  minimus,  Gr.  mikros  ;  further,  in 
numerous  words  for  small  children  or  small  animals  (the  latter 
frequently  used  as  endearing  or  depreciative  words  for  children), 
e.g.  child  (formerly  with  [i*]  sound),  G.  kind,  Dan.  pilt,  E.  kid, 
chit,  imp,  slip,  pigmy,  midge,  Sp.  chico,  or  for  small  things  :  bit, 
chip,  whit,  Lat.  quisquilice,  mica,  E.  tip,  pin,  chink,  slit.  .  .  .  The 
same  vowel  is  found  in  diminutive  suffixes  in  a  variety  of  languages, 
as  E.  -y,  -ie  {Bobby,  baby,  auntie,  birdie),  Du.  -ie,  -je  (koppie  '  little 
hill '),  Gr.  -i-  (paid-i-on  'little  boy'),  Goth,  -ein,  pronounced  [in] 
{gumein  '  little  man  '),  E.  -kin,  -ling,  Swiss  German  -li,  It.  -ino, 
Sp.  -ico,  -ito,  -illo.  .  .  . 

As  smallness  and  weakness  are  often  taken  to  be  characteristic 
of  the  female  sex,  I  suspect  that  the  Aryan  feminine  suffix  -i,  as 
in  Skr.  vrki  'she-wolf,'  napti  'niece,'  originally  denotes  smallness 
('  wolfy  '),  and  in  the  same  way  we  find  the  vowel  i  in  many 
feminine  suffixes  ;  thus  late  Lat.  -itta  (Julitta,  etc.,  whence  Fr.  -ette, 
Henriette,  etc.),  -ina  (Carolina),  fmiher  G.  -in  (konigin),  Gr.  -issa 
{basilissa  '  queen  '),  whence  Fr.  -esse,  E.  -ess. 

The  same  vowel  [i]  is  also  symbolical  of  a  very  short  time,  as- 
in  the  phrases  in  a  jiff,  jiffy,  Sc.  in  a  clink,  Dan.  i  en  svip  ;  and 
correspondingly  we  have  adjectives  like  quick,  swift,  vivid  and 
others.  No  wonder,  then,  that  the  Germans  feel  their  word  for 
'  lightning,'  blitz,  singularly  appropriate  to  the  effect  of  light  and  to 
the  shortness  of  duration.^ 

It  has  often  been  remarked  ^  that  in  corresponding  pronouns 
and  adverbs  the  vowel  i  frequently  indicates  what  is  nearer,  and 
other  vowels,  especially  a  or  u,  what  is  farther  off  ;  thus  Fr.  ci,  la, 

^  The  preceding  paragraphs  on  the  .symbolic  value  of  i  are  an  abstract 
of  a  paper  which  will  be  printed  in  Philologica,  vol.  i. 

*  Benfey  Gesch  791,  Misteh  5.39,  Wundt  S  I.  331  (but  his  examples  from 
out-of-the-way  languages  must  be  used  with  caution,  and  curiously  enough 
he  thinks  that  the  phenomenon  is  limited  to  primitive  languages  and  is  not 
found  in  Semitic  or  Aryan  languages),  GRM  1.  638,  Simonyi  US  255,  Meinhof, 
Ham  20. 


§8]  SIZE   AND   DISTANCE  408 

E.  here,  there,  G.  dies,  das,  Low  G.  dit,  dat,  Magy.  ez,  emez  '  this,* 
az,  amaz  '  that,'  itt  '  here,'  ott  '  there,'  Malay  iki  '  this,'  ika  '  that, 
a  little  removed,'  iku  '  yon,  farther  away.'  In  Hamitic  languages 
i  symbolizes  the  near  and  u  what  is  far  away.  We  may  here 
also  think  of  the  word  zigzag  as  denoting  movement  in  alternate 
turns  here  and  there ;  and  if  in  the  two  E.  pronouns  this  and  that 
the  old  neuter  forms  have  prevailed  (OE.  m.  yes,  se,  f.  Ipeos,  seo, 
n.  yis,  ycet)  the  reason  (or  one  of  the  reasons)  may  have  been  that 
a  characteristic  difference  of  vowels  in  the  two  contrasted  pronouns 
was  thus  secured. 


XX.— §  9.  Length  and  Strength  of  Words  and  Sounds. 

Shorter  and  more  abrupt  forms  are  more  appropriate  to  certain 
states  of  mind,  longer  ones  to  others.  An  imperative  may  be 
used  both  for  command  and  for  a  more  or  less  humble  appeal  or 
entreaty  ;  in  Magyar  dialects  there  are  short  forms  for  command  : 
irj,  dolgozz  ;  long  for  entreaty  :  irjdl,  dolgozzdl  (Simonyi  US  359, 214). 
Were  Lat.  die,  due,  fac,  fer  used  more  than  other  imperatives  in 
commands  ?  The  fact  that  they  alone  lost  -e  might  indicate  that 
this  was  so.  On  the  other  hand  the  imperatives  es,  este  and  i  had 
to  yield  to  the  fuller  (and  more  polite)  esto,  estate,  vade,  and 
scito  is  always  said  instead  of  sci  (Wackernagel,  Gott.  Ges.  d. 
Wiss.,  1906,  182,  on  the  avoidance  of  too  short  forms  in  general). 
Other  languages,  which  have  only  one  form  for  the  imperative, 
soften  the  commanding  tone  by  adding  some  word  like  please, 
bitte. 

An  emotional  effect  is  obtained  in  some  cases  by  lengthening 
a  word  by  some  derivative  syllables,  in  themselves  unmeaning ; 
thus  in  Danish  words  for  '  lengthy  '  or  '  tiresome  '  :  langsommelig, 
kedsommelig,  evindelig  for  lang{som),  kedelig,  evig.  (Cf.  Ibsen, 
Ndr  vi  dffde  vaguer  98  :  Du  er  kanske  ble't  ked  af  dette  evige 
samliv  med  mig. — Evige  ?  Sig  lige  sa  godt  :  evindelige.)  In  the 
same  way  the  effect  of  splendid  is  strengthened  in  slang  :  splen- 
diferous, splendidous,  splendidious,  splendacious.  A  long  word  like 
aggravate  is  felt  to  be  more  intense  than  vex  (Coleman) — and  that 
may  be  the  reason  why  the  long  word  acquires  a  meaning  that  is 
strange  to  its  etymology.  Atid  "  to  disburden  one's  self  of  a  sense 
of  contempt,  a  robust  full-bodied  detonation,  like,  for  instance, 
platitudinous,  is,  unquestionably,  very  much  more  serviceable 
than  any  evanescing  squib  of  one  or  two  syllables  "  (Fitzedward 
Hall).     Cf.  also  multitudinous,  multifarious. 

We  see  now  the  emotional  value  of  some  '  mouth-filling  '  words, 
some  of  which  may  be  considered  symbolical  expansions  of  existing 
words  (what  H.  Schroder  terms  '  streckforraen  '),  though  others 


404  SOUND   SYMBOLISM  [cii.  xx 

cannot  be  thus  explained  ;  not  unfrequently  the  effect  of  length 
is  combined  with  some  of  the  phonetic  effects  mentioned  above. 
Such  words  are,  e.g.,  sluhberdegullion  '  dirty  fellow,'  rumbustious 
'  boisterous,'  rumgum'ption,  rumfustian,  rumbullion  (of.  rum- 
puncheon  'cask  of  rum'  as  a  term  of  abuse  in  Stevenson,  Treas. 
I  si.  48,  "the  cowardly  son  of  a  rum-puncheon"),  rmnpallioii 
'  villain,'  rapscallion,  ragamuffin  ;  sculduddery  '  obscenity  '  ;  can- 
tankerous '  quarrelsome,'  U.S.  also  rantankerous  (cf.  cankerous, 
rancorous) ;  skilUgalee  '  miserable  gruel,'  flabbergast  '  confound,' 
catawampous  (or  -ptious)  '  fierce  '  ("a  high-soimding  word  with  no 
very  definite  meaning,"  NED)  ;  Fr.  hurluberlu  '  crazy  '  and  the 
sjTionymous  Dan.  tnmmelumsk,  Norw.  tullerusk. 

In  this  connexion  one  may  mention  the  natural  tendency  to 
lengthen  and  to  strengthen  single  sounds  under  the  influence  of 
strong  feeling  and  in  order  to  intensify  the  effect  of  the  spoken 
word ;  thus,  in  '  it's  very  cold  '  both  the  diphthong  [ou]  and  the  [1] 
may  be  pronounced  extremely  long,  in  '  terribly  dull  '  the  [1]  is 
lengthened,  in  '  extremely  long  '  either  the  vowel  [o]  or  the  [t^] 
(or  both)  may  be  lengthened.  In  Fr.  '  c'etait  horrible  '  the  trill 
of  the  [r]  becomes  very  long  and  intense  (while  the  same  effect 
is  not  generally  possible  in  the  corresponding  English  word,  because 
the  English  [r]  is  not  trilled,  but  pronounced  by  one  flap  of  the 
tip).  In  some  cases  a  lengthening  due  to  such  a  psj^chological 
cause  may  permanently  alter  a  word,  as  when  Lat.  totus  in  It. 
has  become  tutto  (Fr.  tout,  toute  goes  back  to  the  same  form,  while 
Sp.  todo  has  preserved  the  form  corresponding  to  the  Lat,  single 
consonant).  An  interesting  collection  of  such  cases  from  the 
Romanic  tongues  has  been  published  by  A.  J.  Carnoy  {Mod.  Philol. 
15.  31,  July  1917),  who  justly  emphasizes  the  symbolic  value  of 
the  change  and  the  special  character  of  the  words  in  which  it 
occurs  (pet-names,  children's  words,  ironic  or  derisive  words, 
imitative  words  .  .  .).  He  says  :  "  While  to  a  phonetician  the 
phenomenon  would  seem  capricious,  its  apportionment  in  the 
vocabulary  is  quite  natural  to  a  psychologist.  In  fact,  reduplica- 
tion, be  it  of  syllables  or  of  consonants,  generall}''  has  that  character 
in  languages.  One  finds  it  in  perfective  tenses,  in  intensive  or 
frequentative  verbs,  in  the  plural,  and  in  collectives.  In  most 
cases  it  is  a  reduplication  of  syllables,  but  a  lengthening  of  vowels 
is  not  rare  and  the  reinforcement  of  consonants  is  also  found. 
In  Chinook,  for  instance,  the  emotional  words,  both  diminutive 
and  augmentative,  are  expressed  by  increasing  the  stress  of  con- 
sonants. It  is,  of  course,  also  well  known  that  in  Semitic  the 
intensive  radical  of  verbs  is  regularl}^  formed  by  a  reduplication 
of  consonants.  To  a  stem  qatal,  e.g.,  answers  an  intensive  :  Eth. 
qattala,  Hebr.  qittel.     Cf.  Hebr.  shibbar  '  to  cut  in  small  pieces  ' 


§9]   LENGTH  AND  STRENGTH  OF  WORDS   405 

[cf.  below],  hillech  '  to  walk,'  qibber  '  to  bury  many,'  etc,  Cf. 
Brockelmann,   Vergl.  Gramm.,  p.  244." 

I  add  a  few  more  examples  from  Misteli  (428  f.)  of  this  Semitic 
strengthening  :  the  first  vowel  is  lengthened  to  express  a  tendency 
or  an  attempt :  qatala  jaqtulu  '  kill '  (in  the  third  person  masc, 
the  former  in  the  prefect-aorist,  the  latter  in  the  imperfect- 
durative,  where  ja,  ju  is  the  sign  of  the  third  person  m.),  qatala 
juqdtilu  '  try  to  kill,  fight  '  ;  faXara  jufXaru  '  excel  in  fame,' 
fdXara  jufdXiru  '  try  to  excel,  vie,'  Through  lengthening 
(doubling)  of  a  consonant  an  intensification  of  the  action  is  denoted  : 
Hebr.  sd^ar  jisbor  '  zerbrechen,'  Hbber  jeSabber  '  zerschmettern,' 
Arab,  daraba  jadrubu  '  strike,'  (f,arraba  jwjarribii  '  beat  violently, 
or  repeatedly  '  ;  sometimes  the  change  makes  a  verb  into  a  causative 
or  transitive,  etc. 

I  imagine  that  we  have  exactly  the  same  kind  of  strengthening 
for  psychological  (symbolical)  reasons  in  a  number  of  verbs  where 
Danish  has  pp,  tt,  kk  by  the  side  of  b,  d,  g  (spirantic)  :  pippe  pibe, 
stritte  stride,  snitte  snide,  sk^tte  shpde,  splitte  splide,  skrikke  skrige, 
lukke  luge,  hikke  hige,  sikke  sige,  kikke  kige,  prikke  prige  (cf.  also 
sproekke  sprcenge).  Some  of  these  forms  are  obsolete,  others 
dialectal,  but  it  would  take  us  too  far  in  this  place  to  deal  with 
the  words  in  detail.  It  is  customary  to  ascribe  this  gemination  to 
an  old  n  derivative  (see,  e.g.,  Brugmann  VG  1.  390,  Streitberg  Urg 
pp.  135,  138,  Noreen  UL  154),  but  it  does  not  seem  necessary  to 
conjure  up  an  n  from  the  dead  to  make  it  disappear  again  imme- 
diately, as  the  mere  strengthening  of  the  consonant  itself  to 
express  symbolically  the  strengthening  of  the  action  has  nothing 
mmatural  in  it.  Cf.  also  G.  placken  by  the  side  of  plagen.  The 
opposite  change,  a  weakening,  may  have  taken  place  in  E.  flag 
(cf .  OFr.  flaquir,  to  become  flaccid),  flabby,  earlier  flappy,  drib  from 
drip,  slab,  if  from  OFr.  esclape,  clod  by  the  side  of  clot,  and  possibly 
cadge,  bodge,  grudge,  smudge,  wliich  had  all  of  them  originally  -tch. 
But  the  common  modification  in  sense  is  not  so  easily  perceived 
here  as  in  the  cases  of  strengthening. 

I  may  here,  for  the  curiosity  of  the  thing,  mention  that  in 
a  '  language  '  coined  by  two  English  children  (a  vocabulary  of 
which  was  communicated  to  me  by  one  of  the  inventors  through 
IVIiss  I.  C.  Ward,  of  the  Department  of  Phonetics,  University 
College,  London)  there  was  a  word  bal  which  meant  '  place,'  but 
the  bigger  the  place  the  longer  the  vowel  was  made,  so  that  with 
three  different  quantities  it  meant  '  village,'  '  town  '  and  '  city  ' 
respectively.  The  word  for  '  go  '  was  dudu,  "  the  greater  the 
speed  of  the  going,  the  more  quickly  the  word  was  said — [doe'dce*] 
walk  slowly."  Cf.  Humboldt,  ed,  Steinthal  82  :  "  In  the  southern 
dialect  of  the  Guarani  language  the  suffix  of  the  perfect  yma  is 


406  SOUND  SYMBOLISM  [ch.  xx 

pronounced  more  or  less  slowly  according  to  the  more  or  less 
remoteness  of  the  past  to  be  indicated." 

XX. — §  10.  General  Considerations. 

Sound  symbolism,  as  we  have  considered  it  in  tliis  chapter, 
has  a  very  wide  range  of  application,  from  direct  imitation  of 
perceived  natural  sounds  to  such  small  quantitative  changes  of 
existing  non-symbolic  words  as  ma}'  be  used  for  purely  gram- 
matical purposes.  But  in  order  to  obtain  a  true  valuation  of  this 
factor  in  the  life  of  language  it  is  of  importance  to  keep  in  view  the 
following  considerations  : 

(1)  No  language  utilizes  soimd  symbolism  to  its  full  extent, 
but  contains  numerous  words  that  are  indifferent  to  or  may  even 
jar  with  symbolism.  To  express  smallness  the  vowel  [i]  is  most 
adequate,  but  it  would  be  absurd  to  say  that  that  vowel  always 
implies  smallness,  or  that  smallness  is  always  expressed  by  words 
containing  that  vowel  :  it  is  enough  to  mention  the  words  biq  and 
small,  or  to  point  to  the  fact  that  thick  and  thin  have  the  same 
vowel,  to  repudiate  such  a  notion. 

(2)  Words  that  have  been  symbolically  expressive  may  cease 
to  be  so  in  consequence  of  historical  development,  either  phonetic 
or  semantic  or  both.  Thus  the  name  of  the  bird  crow  is  not  now 
so  good  an  imitation  of  the  sound  made  by  the  bird  as  OE.  crawe 
was  (Dan.  krage,  Du.  kraai).  Thus,  also,  the  verbs  whine,  'pipe 
were  better  imitations  when  the  voAvel  was  still  [i]  (as  in  Dan. 
hvinc,  pibe).  But  to  express  the  sound  of  a  small  bird  the  latter 
word  is  still  pronounced  with  the  vowel  [i]  either  long  or  short 
(peep,  pip),  the  word  having  been  constantly  renewed  and  as  it 
were  reshaped  by  fresh  imitation ;  cf.  on  Irish  wheen  and  dialectal 
peep,  XV  §  8.  Lat.  pipio  originally  meant  any  '  peeping  bird,' 
but  when  it  came  to  designate  one  particular  kind  of  birds,  it  was 
free  to  follow  the  usual  trend  of  phonetic  development,  and  so 
has  become  Fr.  pigeon  [pi.50],  E.  pigeon  [pidgin].  E.  cuckoo  has 
resisted  the  change  from  [u]  to  [a]  as  in  cut,  because  people  have 
constantly  heard  the  sound  and  fashioned  the  name  of  the  bird 
from  it.  I  once  heard  a  Scotch  lady  say  [kAku*],  but  on  my  inquiry 
she  told  me  that  there  were  no  cuckoos  in  her  native  place  ;  hence 
the  word  had  there  been  treated  as  any  other  word  containing  the 
short  [u].  The  same  word  is  interesting  in  another  way  ;  it  has 
resisted  the  old  Gothonic  consonant-shift,  and  thus  has  the  same 
consonants  as  Skt,  kokiWi,  Gr.  kokkux,  Lat.  cuculus.  On  the 
general  preservation  of  significative  sounds,  cf.  Ch.  XV  §  8. 

(3)  On  the  other  hand,  some  words  have  in  coiu*se  of  time 
become  more  expressive  than  they  were  at  first ;  we  have  some- 


§10]  GENERAL   CONSIDERATIONS  40V 

thing  that  may  be  called  secondary  echoisra  or  secondary  symbolism. 
The  verb  patter  comes  from  pater  (=  paternoster),  and  at  first  meant 
to  repeat  that  prayer,  to  mumble  one's  prayers  ;  but  then  it  was 
associated  with  the  homophonous  verb  patter  '  to  make  a  rapid 
succession  of  pats  '  and  came  mider  the  influence  of  echoic  words 
like  prattle,  chatter,  jabber  ;  it  now,  like  these,  means  '  to  talk  rapidly 
or  glibly  'and  is  to  all  intents  a  truly  symbolical  word  ;  cf .  also  the 
substantive  patter  '  secret  lingo,  speechif3dng,  talk.'  Husky  may 
at  first  have  meant  only  "  full  of  husks,  of  the  nature  of  a  husk  " 
(NED),  but  it  could  not  possibly  from  that  signification  have 
arrived  at  the  now  current  sense  '  dry  in  the  throat,  hoarse  '  if  it 
had  not  been  that  the  sound  of  the  adjective  had  reminded  one 
of  the  sound  of  a  hoarse  voice.  Dan.  pojt  '  poor  drink,  vile  stuS  ' 
is  now  felt  as  expressive  of  contempt,  but  it  originates  in  Poitou, 
an  innocent  geographical  name  of  a  kind  of  wine,  like  Bordeaux  ; 
it  is  now  coimected  with  other  scornful  words  like  sprojt  and  dojt. 
In  E.  little  the  symbolic  vowel  i  is  regularly  developed  from 
OE.  y,  lytel,  whose  i/  is  a  mutated  u,  as  seen  in  OSax.  luttil ;  u  also 
appears  in  other  related  languages,  and  the  word  thus  originally 
had  nothing  s3anbolical  about  it.  But  in  Gothic  the  word  is  leitils 
{ei,  sounded  [i])  and  in  ON.  litinn,  and  here  the  vowel  is  so  difficult 
to  account  for  on  ordinary  principles  that  the  NED  in  despair 
thinks  that  the  two  words  are  "radically  miconnected."  I  have 
no  hesitation  in  supposing  that  the  vowel  i  is  due  to  sound  sym- 
bolism, exactly  as  the  smaller  change  introduced  in  modern  E. 
'  leetle,'  with  narrow  instead  of  wide  (broad)  [i].  In  the  word 
for  the  opposite  meaning,  much,  the  phonetic  development  may 
also  have  been  influenced  by  the  tendency  to  get  an  adequate 
vowel,  for  normally  we  should  expect  the  vowel  [i]  as  in  Sc.  mickle, 
from  OE.  micel.  In  E.  quick  the  vowel  beat  adapted  to  the  idea 
has  prevailed  instead  of  the  one  found  in  the  old  nom.  forma 
cioiccu,  cucu  from  cwicu  (inflected  civicne,  cwices,  etc.),  while  in  the 
word  ividu,  wudu,,  which  is  phonetically  analogous,  there  was  no 
such  inducement,  and  the  vowel  [u]  has  been  preserved  :  wood. 
The  same  prevalence  of  the  symbolic  i  is  noticed  in  the  Dan.  adj. 
kvik,  MLG.  quik,  while  the  same  word  as  subst.  has  become  Dan. 
kvcBg,  MLG.  quek,  where  there  was  no  symbolism  at  work,  as  it 
has  come  to  mean  '  cattle.'  I  even  see  symbolism  in  the  preserva- 
tion of  the  k  in  the  Dan.  adj.  (as  against  the  fricative  in  kvceg), 
because  the  notion  of  '  quick  "  is  best  expressed  by  the  short  [i], 
interrupted  by  a  stop  ;  and  may  not  the  same  force  have  been 
at  work  in  this  adjective  at  an  earlier  period  ?  The  second  k  in 
OE.  cwicu,  ON.  kvikr  as  against  Goth,  qius,  Lat.  vivus,  has  not 
been  sufficiently  explained.  An  [i],  symbolic  of  smallness,  has  been 
introduced  in  some  comparatively  recent  E.  words  :  tip  from  top. 


408  SOUND  SYMBOLISM  [ch.  xx 

trip  '  small  flock  '  from  troop,  sip  '  drink  in  small  quantities  '  from 
sup,  sop. 

Through  changes  in  meaning,  too,  some  words  have  become 
symbolically  more  expressive  than  they  were  formerly  ;  thus  the 
agreement  between  sound  and  sense  is  of  late  growth  in  miniature, 
which  now,  on  account  of  the  i,  has  come  to  mean  '  a  small  picture,' 
while  at  first  it  meant  '  image  painted  with  minium  or  vermilion,' 
and  in  pittance,  now  '  a  scanty  allowance,'  formerly  any  pious 
donation,  whether  great  or  small.  Cf.  what  has  been  said  above 
of  sullen,  moody,  catch. 


XX. — §  11.  Importance  of  Suggestiveness. 

The  suggestiveness  of  some  words  as  felt  by  present-day 
speakers  is  a  fact  that  must  be  taken  into  account  if  we  are  to 
understand  the  realities  of  language.  In  some  cases  it  may  have 
existed  from  the  very  first  :  these  words  sprang  thus  into  being 
because  that  shape  at  once  expressed  the  idea  the  speaker  wished 
to  communicate.  In  other  cases  the  suggestive  element  is  not 
original :  these  words  arose  in  the  same  waj^  as  innumerable  others 
whose  sound  has  never  carried  any  suggestion.  But  if  the  sound 
of  a  word  of  this  class  was,  or  came  to  be,  in  some  way  suggestive 
of  its  signification — say,  if  a  word  containing  the  vowel  [ij  in  a 
prominent  place  meant  '  small '  or  something  small — then  the  sound 
exerted  a  strong  influence  in  gaining  popular  favour  to  the  word ; 
it  was  an  inducement  to  people  to  choose  and  to  prefer  that 
particular  word  and  to  cease  to  use  words  for  the  same  notion 
that  were  not  thus  favoured.  Sound  symbolism,  we  may  say, 
makes  some  words  more  fit  to  survive  and  gives  them  considerable 
help  in  their  struggle  for  existence.  If  we  want  to  denote  a  little 
child  by  a  word  for  some  small  animal,  we  take  some  word  like 
kid,  chick,  kitten,  rather  than  bat  or  2>^({l  or  sing,  though  these  may 
in  themselves  be  smaller  than  the  animal  chosen. 

It  is  quite  true  that  Fr.  rouler,  our  roll,  is  derived  from  Lat. 
rota  '  wheel  '  +  a  diminutive  ending  -id-,  but  the  word  would 
never  have  gained  its  immense  popularity,  extending  as  it  does 
through  English,  Dutch,  German  and  the  Scandinavian  languages, 
if  the  sound  had  not  been  eminently  suggestive  of  the  sense,  so 
suggestive  that  it  seems  to  us  now  the  natural  expression  for  that 
idea,  and  we  have  difficulty  in  realizing  that  the  ^^■ord  has  not 
existed  from  the  ver}'  dawn  of  speech.  Or  let  me  take  another 
example,  in  which  the  connexion  between  sound  and  sense  is  even 
more  'fortuitous.'  About  a  hundred  years  ago  a  member  of 
Congress,  Felix  Walker,  from  Buncombe  Count}',  North  Carolina, 
made  a  long  and  tedious  speech.     "  Many  members  left  the  hall. 


§11]        IMPORTANTE  OF  SUGGESTIVENESS  409 

Very  naively  he  told  those  who  remained  that  they  might  go  too  ; 
he  should  speak  for  some  time,  but  '  he  was  only  talking  for 
Buncombe,'  to  please  his  constituents."  Now  buncombe  [buncome, 
bunkum)  has  become  a  widely  used  word,  not  only  in  the  States, 
but  all  over  the  English-speaking  world,  for  political  speaking  or 
action  not  resting  on  conviction,  but  on  the  desire  of  gaining  the 
favour  of  electors,  or  for  any  kind  of  empty  '  clap-trap  '  oratory  ; 
but  does  anybody  suppose  that  the  name  of  ]\Ir,  Walker's  constitu- 
ency would  have  been  thus  used  if  he  had  happened  to  hail  from 
Annapolis  or  Philadelphia,  or  some  other  place  with  a  name  incapable 
of  tickling  the  popular  fancy  in  the  same  way  as  Buncombe  does  ? 
(Cf.  above,  p.  401  on  the  suggostiveness  of  the  short  u.)  In  a 
similar  way  hullaballoo  seems  to  have  originated  from  the  Irish 
village  Ballyhooly  (see  P.  W.  Joyce,  English  as  ice  speak  it  in 
Ireland)  and  to  have  become  popular  on  account  of  its  suggestive 
sound. 

In  loan-words  we  can  often  see  that  they  have  been  adopted 
less  on  accoimt  of  any  cultural  necessity  (see  above,  p.  209)  than 
because  their  sound  was  in  some  way  or  other  suggestive.  Thus 
the  Algonkin  (Natick)  word  for  '  chief,'  mugquomp,  is  used  in  the 
United  States  in  the  form  of  mugivump  for  a  '  great  man  '  or  '  boss,' 
and  especially,  in  political  life,  for  a  man  independent  of  parties 
and  thinking  himself  superior  to  parties.  Now,  no  one  would 
have  thought  of  going  to  an  Indian  language  to  express  such  a 
notion,  had  not  an  Indian  word  presented  itself  which  from  its 
uncouth  sound  lent  itself  to  purposes  of  ridicule.  Among  other 
words  whose  adoption  has  been  favoured  by  their  soimds  I  may 
mention  jungle  (from  Hindi  jangal,  associated  more  or  less  closely 
with  jumble,  tumble,  bundle,  bungle) ;  bobbery,  in  slang  '  noise, 
squabble,'  "  the  Anglo-Indian  colloquial  representation  of  a  common 
exclamation  of  Hindus  when  in  surprise  or  grief — Bap-re  !  or 
Bap-re  Bap  '  0  Father  !  '  "  (Hobson-Jobson) ;  amuck ;  and  U.S. 
bunco  '  swindling  game,  to  swindle,'  from  It.  banco. 

XX.— §  12.  Ancient  and  Modern  Times. 

It  will  be  seen  that  our  conception  of  echoism  and  related 
phenomena  does  not  carry  us  back  to  an  imaginary  primitive 
period  :  these  forces  are  vital  in  languages  as  we  observe  them 
day  by  day.  ^Linguistic  writers,  however,  often  assume  that 
soimd  symbolism,  if  existing  at  all,  must  date  back  to  the  earliest 
times,  and  therefore  can  have  no  reality  nowadays.  Thus  Benfey 
(Gesch  288)  turns  upon  de  Brosse,  who  had  found  rudeness  in 
Fr.  rude  and  gentleness  in  Fr.  doux,  and  says  :  "  As  if  the  sounds 
of  such  words,  which  are  distant  by  an  infinite  length  of  time  from 


410  SOUND  SYMBOLISM  [ch.  xx 

the  time  when  language  originated,  were  able  to  contribute  ever 
80  little  to  explain  the  original  designation  of  things."  (But 
Benfey  is  right  in  saying  that  the  impression  made  by  those  two 
French  words  may  be  imaginary  ;  as  examples  they  are  not  par- 
ticularly well  chosen.)  Siitterlin  (WW  14)  says  :  "  It  is  bold  to 
search  for  such  correspondence  as  still  existing  in  detail  in  the 
language  of  our  own  daj^s.  For  words  like  liebe,  siiss  on  the  one 
hand,  and  zorn,  hass,  hart  on  the  other,  which  are  often  alleged 
by  dilettanti,  prove  nothing  to  the  scholar,  because  their  form 
is  young  and  must  have  had  totally  different  sounds  in  the  period 
when  language  was  created." 

Similarly  de  Saussure  (LG  104)  gives  as  one  of  the  main  prin- 
ciples of  our  science  that  the  tie  between  sound  and  sense  is 
arbitrary  or  rather  motiveless  (immotive),  and  to  those  who  would 
object  that  onomatopoetic  words  are  not  arbitrary  he  says  that 
"  they  are  never  organic  elements  of  a  linguistic  system.  Besides, 
they  are  much  less  numerous  than  is  generally  supposed.  Such 
words  as  Fr.  fouet  and  glas  may  strike  some  ears  with  a  suggestive 
ring  ;  ^  but  they  have  not  had  that  character  from  the  start,  as  is 
sufficiently  proved  if  we  go  back  to  their  Latin  forms  (fouet  derived 
from  fagus  '  beech,'  glas  =  classicum)  ;  the  quality  possessed  by, 
or  rather  attributed  to,  their  actual  sounds  is  a  fortuitous  result 
of  phonetic  development." 

Here  we  see  one  of  the  characteristics  of  modern  linguistic 
science  :  it  is  so  preoccupied  with  etymology,  with  the  origin  of 
words,  that  it  pays  much  more  attention  to  what  words  have 
come  from  than  to  what  they  have  come  to  be.  If  a  word  has 
not  always  been  suggestive  on  account  of  its  sound,  then  its  actual 
suggestiveness  is  left  out  of  account  and  may  even  be  declared 
to  be  merely  fanciful.  I  hope  that  this  chapter  contains  throughout 
what  is  psychologically  a  more  true  and  linguistically  a  more 
fruitful  view. 

Though  some  echo  words  may  be  very  old,  the  great  majority 
are  not ;  at  any  rate,  in  looking  up  the  earliest  ascertained  date 
of  a  goodly  number  of  such  words  in  the  NED,  I  have  been  struck 
by  the  fact  of  so  many  of  them  being  quite  recent,  not  more  than 
a  few  centuries  old,  and  some  not  even  that.     To  some  extent 

*  I  must  confess  that  I  find  nothing  sjonbolical  in  gins  and  very  little 
in  fotiet  (though  the  verb  fouetier  has  something  of  the  force  of  E.  tvhip). 
On  the  whole,  much  of  what  people  '  hear '  in  a  word  appears  to  me  fanciful 
and  apt  to  discredit  reasonable  attempts  at  gaining  an  insight  into  the 
essence  of  sound  symbolism ;  thus  E.  Lerch's  ridiculous  remark  on  G.  loch 
in  GRM  7.  101  :  "  loch  malt  die  bewegung,  die  der  anblick  eines  solchen 
im  beschauer  au8l6st,  durch  eine  entsprechende  bewegung  der  sprachwerk- 
zcuge,  beginnend  mit  der  liquida  zur  bezeichnung  der  rundung  und  endend 
mit  dem  gutturalen  ch  tief  hinten  in  der  gurgel." 


§12]  ANCIENT   AND  MODERN  TIMES  411 

their  recent  appearance  in  \^Titing  may  be  ascribed  to  the  general 
character  of  the  old  literature  as  contrasted  with  our  modern 
literature,  which  is  less  conventional,  freer  in  many  ways,  more 
true  to  life  with  its  infinite  variety  and  more  true,  too,  to  the 
spoken  language  of  every  day.  But  that  cannot  account  for 
everything,  and  there  is  every  probability  that  this  class  of  words 
is  really  more  frequent  in  the  spoken  language  of  recent  times 
than  it  was  formerly,  because  people  speak  in  a  more  vivid  and 
fresh  fashion  than  their  ancestors  of  hundreds  or  thousands  of 
years  ago.  The  time  of  psychological  reaction  is  shorter  than  it 
used  to  be,  life  moves  at  a  more  rapid  rate,  and  people  are  less 
tied  dovra  to  tradition  than  in  former  ages,  consequently  they  are 
more  apt  to  create  and  to  adopt  new  words  of  this  particular  type, 
which  are  felt  at  once  to  be  significant  and  expressive.  In  all 
languages  the  creation  and  use  of  echoic  and  symbolic  words  seems 
to  have  been  on  the  increase  in  historical  times.  If  to  this  we 
add  the  selective  process  through  which  words  which  have  only 
secondarily  acquired  symbolical  value  survive  at  the  cost  of  less 
adequate  expressions,  or  less  adequate  forms  of  the  same  words, 
and  subsequently  give  rise  to  a  host  of  derivatives,  then  we  may 
say  that  languages  in  course  of  time  grow  richer  and  richer  in 
s3anbolic  words.  So  far  from  believing  in  a  golden  primitive  age, 
in  which  everything  in  language  was  expressive  and  immediately 
intelligible  on  account  of  the  significative  value  of  each  group  of 
sounds,  we  arrive  rather,  here  as  in  other  domains,  at  the  con- 
ception of  a  slow  progressive  development  towards  a  greater 
number  of  easy  and  adequate  expressions — expressions  in  which 
sound  and  sense  are  united  in  a  marriage-union  closer  than  was 
ever  known  to  our  remote  ancestors. 


CHAPTER   XXI 
THE    ORIGIN    OF    SPEECH 

§  1.  Introduction.  §  2.  Former  Theories.  §  3.  Method.  §  4.  Sounds. 
§  5.  Grammar.  §  (^  Units.  §  7.  Irregularities.  §  8.  Savage 
Tribes.  §  9.  Law  of  Development.  §  10.  Vocabulary.  §  11.  Poetry 
and  Prose.  §  12.  Emotional  Songs.  §  13.  Primitive  Singing. 
§  14.  Approach  to  Language.  §  15.  The  Earliest  Sentences. 
§  16.  Conclusion. 

XXI.— §  1.  Introduction. 

Much  of  what  is  contained  in  the  last  chapters  is  preparatory 
to  the  theme  which  is  to  occupy  us  in  this  chapter,  the  ultimate 
origin  of  human  speech.  We  have  already  seen  the  feeling  with 
which  this  subject  has  often  been  regarded  by  eminent  linguists, 
the  feeling  which  led  to  an  absolute  taboo  of  the  question  in  the 
French  Societe  de  linguistique  (p.  96).  One  may  here  quote 
Whitney  :  "  No  theme  in  linguistic  science  is  more  often  and 
more  voluminously  treated  than  this,  and  by  scholars  of  everj' 
grade  and  tendency  ;  nor  any,  it  may  be  added,  with  less  i^rofitable 
result  in  proportion  to  the  labour  expended  ;  the  greater  part  of 
what  is  said  and  written  upon  it  is  mere  windy  talk,  the  assertion 
of  subjective  views  which  commend  themselves  to  no  mind  save 
the  one  that  produces  them,  and  which  are  apt  to  be  offered  with 
a  confidence,  and  defended  with  a  tenacity,  that  are  in  inverse 
ratio  to  their  acceptableness.  This  has  given  the  whole  question 
a  bad  repute  among  sober-minded  philologists  "  (OLS  1.  279). 

Nevertheless,  linguistic  science  cannot  refrain  for  ever  from 
asking  about  the  whence  (and  about  the  whither)  of  linguistic 
evolution.  And  here  we  must  first  of  all  realize  that  man  is  not 
the  only  animal  that  has  a  '  language,'  though  at  present  we  know 
very  little  about  the  real  nature  and  expressiveness  of  the  languages 
of  birds  and  mammals  or  of  the  signalling  system  of  ants,  etc. 
The  speech  of  some  animals  may  be  more  like  our  language  than 
most  people  are  willing  to  admit — it  may  also  in  some  respects 
be  even  more  perfect  than  human  language  precisely  because  it 
is  unlike  it  and  has  developed  along  lines  about  which  we  can  know 
nothing ;  but  it  is  of  little  avail  to  speculate  on  these  matters.  What 
is  certain  is  that  no  race  of  mankind  is  without  a  language  which 

il2 


§  1]  INTRODUCTION  41 S 

in  everything  essential  is  identical  in  character  with  our  own, 
and  that  there  are  a  certain  number  of  circumstances  which  have 
been  of  signal  importance  in  assisting  mankind  in  developing 
language  (cf.  Gabelentz  Spr  294  ff.)- 

First  of  all,  man  has  an  upright  gait ;  this  gives  him  two  limbs 
more  than  the  dog  has,  for  instance  :  he  can  carry  things  and  yet 
jabber  on ;  he  is  not  reduced  to  defending  himself  by  biting^  but 
can  use  his  mouth  for  other  purposes.  Feeding  also  takes  less 
time  in  his  case  than  in  that  of  the  cow,  who  has  little  time  for  any- 
thing else  than  chewing  and  a  moo  now  and  then.  The  sexual 
life  of  man  is  not  restricted  to  one  particular  time  of  the  year, 
the  two  sexes  remain  together  the  whole  year  round,  and  thus 
sociability  is  promoted  ;  the  helplessness  of  babies  works  in  the 
same  direction  through  necessitating  a  more  continuous  family 
life,  in  which  there  is  also  time  enough  for  all  kinds  of  sports,  in- 
cluding play  with  the  vocal  organs.  Thus  conditions  have  been 
generally  favourable  for  the  development  of  singing  and  talking, 
but  the  problem  is,  how  could  soimds  and  ideas  come  to  be  connected 
as  thej^  are  in  language  ? 

What  method  or  methods  have  we  for  the  solution  of  this  ques- 
tion ?  With  very  few  exceptions  those  v\  ho  have  written  about  our 
subject  have  conjured  up  in  their  imagination  a  primitive  era,  and 
then  asked  themselves  :  How  would  it  be  possible  for  men  or  man- 
like beings,  hitherto  unfurnished  with  speech,  to  acquire  speech  as 
a  means  of  commimication  of  thought  ?  Not  only  is  this  method 
followed,  so  to  speak,  instinctively  by  investigators,  but  we  are 
even  positively  told  (by  Marty)  that  it  is  the  only  method  possible. 
In  direct  opposition  to  this  assertion,  I  think  that  it  is  chiefly  and 
principally  due  to  this  method  and  to  this  way  of  putting  the 
question  that  so  little  has  yet  been  done  to  solve  it.  If  we  are 
to  have  any  hope  of  success  in  our  investigation  we  must  try  new 
methods  and  new  ways — and  fortunately  there  are  ways  which 
lead  us  to  a  point  from  wliich  we  may  expect  to  see  the  world  of 
primitive  language  revealed  to  us  in  a  new  light.  But  let  us  first 
cast  a  rapid  glance  at  those  theories  which  have  been  advanced 
b}''  followers  of  the  speculative  or  a  priori  method. 

XXI.— §  2.  Former  Theories. 

One  theory  is  that  primitive  words  were  imitative  of  sounds  : 
man  copied  the  barking  of  dogs  and  thereby  obtained  a  natural 
word  with  the  meaning  of  '  dog  '  or  '  bark.'  To  tnis  theory,  nick- 
named the  bow-woio  theory,  Kenan  objects  that  it  seems  rather 
absurd  to  set  up  this  chronological  sequence  :  first  the  lower  animals 
are  original  enough  to  cry  and  roar  ;  and  then  comes  man,  making 


414  THE  ORIGIN  OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

a  lanpfuage  for  himself  by  imitating  his  inferiors.  But  surely  man 
would  imitate  not  onl}'  the  cries  of  inferior  animals,  but  also  those 
of  his  fellow-men,  and  the  salient  point  of  the  theory  is  this  :  sounds 
which  in  one  creature  were  produced  without  any  meaning,  but 
which  were  characteristic  of  that  creature,  could  by  man  be  used 
to  designate  the  creature  itself  (or  the  movement  or  action  produc- 
tive of  the  sound).  In  this  way  an  originally  unmeaning  sound 
could  in  the  mouth  of  an  imitator  and  in  the  mind  of  someone 
hearing  that  imitation  acquire  a  real  meaning.  In  the  chapt<^r 
on  Sound  Sjinbolism  I  have  tried  to  show  how  from  the  rudest 
and  most  direct  imitations  of  this  kind  we  may  arrive  through 
many  gradations  at  some  of  the  subtlest  effects  of  human  speech, 
and  how  imitation,  in  the  widest  sense  we  can  give  to  this  word — 
a  wider  sense  than  most  advocates  of  the  theory  seem  able  to 
imagine — is  so  far  from  belonging  exclusively  to  a  primitive  age 
that  it  is  not  extinct  even  yet.  There  is  not  much  of  value  in  Max 
Miiller's  remark  that  "  the  onomatopoeic  theory  goes  very  smoothly 
as  long  as  it  deals  with  cackling  hens  and  quacking  ducks  ;  but 
round  that  poultry-yard  there  is  a  high  wall,  and  we  soon  find 
that  it  is  behind  that  wall  that  language  really  begins  "  {Life  2.  97), 
or  in  his  other  remark  that  "  words  of  this  kind  (cuckoo)  are,  like 
artificial  flowers,  without  a  root.  They  are  sterile,  and  unfit  to 
express  anything  beyond  the  one  object  which  they  imitate  " 
(ib.  1.  410).  But  cuckoo  may  become  cuckold(FT.  cocu).  and  from 
cock  are  derived  the  names  Miiller  himself  mentions,  Fr.  coquet, 
coquetterie,  cocart,  cocarde,  coquelicot.  .  .  .  Echoic  words  may  be 
just  as  fertile  as  any  other  part  of  the  vocabula^3^ 

Another  theory  is  the  int-erjectional,  nicknamed  the  pooh-pooh, 
theory  :  language  is  derived  from  instinctive  ejaculations  called 
forth  by  pain  or  other  intense  sensations  or  feelings.  The  adherents 
of  this  theory  generally  take  these  interjections  for  granted,  with- 
out asking  about  the  way  in  which  they  have  come  into  existence. 
Darwin,  however,  in  The  Expression  of  the  Emotions,  gives  purely 
physiological  reasons  for  some  interjections,  as  when  the  feeling 
of  contempt  or  disgust  is  accompanied  by  a  tendency  "  to  blow 
out  of  the  mouth  or  nostrils,  and  this  produces  sounds  like  pooh  or 
pish."  Again,  "  when  anyone  is  startled  or  suddenly  astonished, 
there  is  an  instantaneous  tendency,  likewise  from  an  intelligible 
cause,  namely,  to  be  ready  for  prolonged  exertion,  to  open  the 
mouth  widely,  so  as  to  draw  a  deep  and  rapid  inspiration.  When 
the  next  full  expiration  follows,  the  mouth  is  slightly  closed,  and 
the  lips,  from  causes  hereafter  to  be  discussed,  are  somewhat 
protruded  ;  and  this  form  of  the  mouth,  if  the  voice  be  at  all 
exerted,  produces  .  .  .  the  sound  of  the  vowel  o.  Certainly  a 
deep  sound  of  a  prolonged  Oh  !  may  be  heard  from  a  whole  crowd 


§2]  FORMER  THEORIES  415 

of  people  immediately  after  witnessing  any  astonisliing  spectacle. 
Tf,  together  with  sm'prise,  pain  be  felt,  there  i.s  a  tendency  to  con- 
tract all  the  muscles  of  the  body,  including  those  of  the  face,  and 
the  lips  will  then  be  drawn  back  ;  and  this  vi'ill  perhaps  account 
for  the  sound  becoming  higher  and  assuming  the  character  of 
Ah  !   or  Ach  !  " 

To  the  ordinary  inter jectional  theory  it  may  be  objected  that 
the  usual  interjections  are  abrupt  expressions  for  sudden  sensations 
and  emotions ;  they  are  therefore  isolated  in  relation  to  the  speech 
material  used  in  the  rest  of  the  language.  "  Between  interjection 
and  word  there  is  a  chasm  wide  enough  to  allow  us  to  say  that  the 
interjection  is  the  negation  of  language,  for  interjections  are 
employed  only  when  one  either  cannot  or  will  not  speak  "  (Benfey 
Gesch  295).  This  '  chasm  '  is  also  shown  phonetically  by  the  fact 
that  the  most  spontaneous  interjections  often  contain  sounds 
which  are  not  used  in'  language  proper,  voiceless  vowels,  inspira- 
tory sounds,  clicks,  etc.,  whence  the  impossibility  properly  to 
represent  them  by  means  of  our  ordinary  alphabet  :  the  spellings 
pooh,  pish,  whew,  tut  are  very  poor  renderings  indeed  of  the  natural 
sounds.  On  the  other  hand,  many  interjections  are  now  more 
or  less  conventionalized  and  are  learnt  like  any  other  words,  con- 
sequently with  a  different  form  in  different  languages  :  in  pain  a 
German  and  a  Seelander  will  exclaim  au,  a  Jutlander  aiis,  a  French- 
man ahi  and  an  Englishman  oh,  or  perhaps  ow.  Kipling  writes 
in  one  of  his  stories  :  "  That  man  is  no  Afghan,  for  they  weep 
'  Ai !  Ai  !  '  Nor  is  he  of  Hindustan,  for  they  weep  '  Oh  !  Ho  !  ' 
He  weeps  after  the  fashion  of  the  white  men,  who  say, '  Ow  !  Ow  !  '  " 

A  closely  related  theory  is  the  nativistic,  nicknamed  the  ding- 
dong,  theory,  according  to  which  there  is  a  mystic  harmony  between 
soimd  and  sense  :  "  There  is  a  law  which  runs  through  nearly 
the  whole  of  natiire,  that  everything  which  is  struck  rings.  Each 
substance  has  its  peculiar  ring."  Language  is  the  result  of  an 
instinct,  a  "  faculty  peculiar  to  man  in  his  primitive  state,  by  which 
every  impression  from  without  received  its  vocal  expression  from 
within  " — a  faculty  which  "  became  extinct  when  its  object  was 
fulfilled."  This  theory,  which  Max  Mixller  propounded  and  after- 
wards wisely  abandoned,  is  mentioned  here  for  the  curiosity  of  the 
matter  only. 

Noire  started  a  fourth  theory,  nicknamed  the  yo-he-ho  :  under 
any  strong  muscular  effort  it  is  a  relief  to  the  system  to  let  breath 
come  out  strongly  and  repeatedly,  and  by  that  process  to  let  the 
vocal  chords  vibrate  in  different  ways  ;  when  primitive  acts  were 
performed  in  common,  the}'  would,  therefore,  naturally  be  accom- 
panied with  some  sounds  which  would  come  to  be  associated  with 
the  idea  of  the  act  performed  and  stand  as  a  name  for  it ;    the 


416  THE  ORIGIN  OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

first  words  would  accordingly  mean  something  like  '  heave  '  or 
'  haul.' 

Now,  these  theories,  here  imperfectly  reproduced  each  in  a  few 
lines,  are  mutually  antagonistic  :  thus  Noire  thinks  it  possible  to 
explain  the  origin  of  speech  without  sound  imitation.  And  yet 
what  should  prevent  our  combining  these  several  theories  and  asing 
them  concmrently  ?  It  would  seem  to  matter  very  little  whether 
the  first  word  uttered  by  man  was  bow-wow  or  pooh-pooh,  for  the 
fact  remains  that  he  said  both  one  and  the  other.  Each  of  the  three 
chief  theories  enables  one  to  explain  parts  of  language,  but  still 
only  parts,  and  not  even  the  most  important  parts — the  main 
body  of  language  seems  hardly  to  be  touched  by  any  of  them. 
Again,  with  the  exception  of  Noire's  theory-,  they  are  too 
individualistic  and  take  too  little  account  of  language  as  a 
means  of  human  intercourse.  Moreover,  they  all  tacitly  assume 
that  up  to  the  creation  of  language  man  had  remained  mute  or 
silent ;  but  this  is  most  improbable  from  a  physiological  point 
of  view.  As  a  rule  we  do  not  find  an  organ  already  perfected 
on  the  first  occasion  of  its  use  ;  it  is  only  by  use  that  an  organ 
is  developed. 

XXI.— §  3.  Method. 

So  much  for  the  results  of  the  first  method  of  approaching 
the  question  of  the  origin  of  speech,  that  of  trying  to  picture  to 
oneself  a  speechless  mankind  and  speculating  on  the  way  in  which 
language  could  then  have  originated.  We  shall  now,  as  hinted 
above  (p.  413),  indicate  the  ways  in  which  it  is  possible  to  supple- 
ment, and  even  in  some  measure  to  supplant,  this  speculative 
or  deductive  method  by  means  of  inductive  reasonings.  These 
can  be  based  on  three  fields  of  investigation,  namely : 

(1)  The  language  of  children  ; 

(2)  The  language  of  primitive  races,  and 

(3)  The  history  of  language. 

Of  these,  the  third  is  the  most  fruitful  source  of  information. 

First,  as  to  the  language  of  children.  Some  biologists  maintain 
that  the  development  of  the  individual  follows  on  the  whole  the 
same  course  as  that  of  the  race  ;  the  embryo,  before  it  arrives  at 
full  maturity,  will  have  passed  through  the  same  stages  of  develop- 
ment which  in  countless  generations  have  led  the  whole  species 
to  its  present  level.  It  has,  therefore,  occurred  to  many  that  the 
acquisition  by  mankind  at  large  of  the  faculty  of  speech  may 
be  mirrored  to  us  in  the  process  by  which  any  child  learns  to 
communicate  its  thoughts  by  means  of  its  vocal  organs.     Accord- 


§3]  METHOD  417 

ingly,  children's  language  has  often  been  invoked  to  furnish  illus- 
trations and  parallels  of  the  i)rocess  gone  through  in  the  formation 
of  primitive  language.  But  many  writers  have  been  guilty  of  an 
erroneous  iiiference  in  applying  this  principle,  inasmuch  as  they  have 
taken  all  their  examples  from  a  child's  acquisition  of  an  already 
existing  language.  The  fallacy  will  be  evident  if  we  suppose  for 
a  moment  the  case  of  a  man  endeavouring  to  arrive  at  the  evolution 
of  music  from  the  manner  in  which  a  child  is  nowadays  taught  to 
play  on  tlie  piano.  Manifestly,  the  modern  learner  is  in  quite 
a  different  position  to  primitive  man,  and  has  quite  a  different 
task  set  him  :  he  has  an  instrument  ready  to  hand,  and  melodies 
already  composed  for  him,  and  finally  a  teacher  \^ho  understands 
how  to  draAv  these  tunes  foi'th  from  the  instrument.  It  is  the  same 
thing  with  language  ;  the  task  of  the  child  is  to  learn  an  existing 
language,  that  is,  to  connect  certain  sounds  heard  on  the  lips  of 
others  with  the  same  ideas  that  the  speakers  associate  with  them, 
but  not  in  the  least  to  frame  anything  new.  No  ;  if  we  are  seeking 
some  parallel  to  the  primitive  acquisition  of  language,  we  must 
look  elsewhere  and  turn  to  baby  language  as  it  is  spoken  in  the  first 
year  of  life,  before  the  cliild  has  begun  to  '  notice  '  and  to  make 
out  what  use  is  made  of  language  by  grown-up  people.  Here, 
in  the  child's  first  purposeless  murmuring,  crowing  and  babbling, 
we  have  real  nature  sounds  ;  here  we  may  expect  to  find  some 
clue  to  the  infancy  of  the  language  of  the  race.  And,  again,  we 
must  not  neglect  the  way  children  have  of  creating  new  words 
never  heard  before,  and  often  of  attaching  a  sense  to  originally 
meaningless  conglomerations  of  sound. 

As  for  the  languages  of  contemporary  savages,  we  may  in  some 
instances  take  them  as  t\-pical  of  more  primitive  languages  than 
those  of  civilized  nations,  and  therefore  as  illustrating  a  linguistic 
stage  that  is  nearer  to  that  in  which  speech  originated.  Still, 
inferences  Trom  such  languages  should  be  used  with  great  caution, 
for  it  should  never  be  forgotten  than  even  the  most  backward 
race  has  many  centuries  of  linguistic  evolution  behind  it,  and  that 
the  conditions  therefore  may,  or  must,  be  very  different  from  those 
of  primeval  man.  The  so-called  primitive  languages  Avill  therefore 
in  the  following  sections  be  only  invoked  to  corroborate  conclusions 
at  which  it  is  possible  to  arrive  from  other  data. 

The  third  and  most  fruitful  source  from  which  to  gather  in- 
formation of  value  for  our  investigation  is  the  history  of  language 
as  it  has  been  considered  in  previous  chapters  of  this  work.  While 
the  propounders  of  the  theories  of  the  origin  of  speech  mentioned 
above  made  straight  for  the  front  of  the  lion's  den,  we  are  like 
the  fox  in  the  fable,  who  noticed  that  all  the  traces  led  into  the  den 
and  not  a  single  one  came  out  ;    we  will  therefore  try  and  steal 

27 


418  THE  ORIGIN  OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

into  the  den  from  behind.  They  thought  it  logically  correct, 
nay  necessary,  to  begin  at  the  beginning ;  let  us,  for  variety's 
sake,  begin  with  languages  accessible  at  the  present  day,  and  let 
us  attempt  from  that  starting-point  step  by  step  to  trace  the 
backward  path.  Perhaps  in  this  way  we  may  reach  the  very 
first  beginnings  of  speech. 

The  method  I  recommend,  and  which  I  think  I  am  the  first 
to  employ  consistently,  is  to  trace  our  modern  twentieth-century 
languages  as  far  back  in  time  as  liistory  and  our  materials  will 
allow  us  ;  and  then,  from  this  comparison  of  present  English  with 
Old  English,  of  Danish  with  Old  Norse,  and  of  both  with  '  Common 
Gothonic,'  of  French  and  Italian  with  Latin,  of  modern  Lidian 
dialects  with  Sanskrit,  etc.,  to  deduce  definite  laws  for  the  develop- 
ment of  languages  in  general,  and  to  try  and  find  a  system  of  lines 
which  can  be  lengthened  backwards  beyond  the  reach  of  history. 
If  we  should  succeed  in  discovering  certain  qualities  to  be  generally 
typical  of  tlie  earlier  as  opposed  to  the  later  stages  of  languages, 
we  shall  be  justified  in  concluding  that  the  same  qualities  obtained 
in  a  still  higher  degree  in  the  earliest  times  of  all  ;  if  we  are  able 
witliin  the  historical  era  to  demonstrate  a  definite  direction  of 
linguistic  evolution,  we  must  be  allowed  to  infer  that  the  direction 
was  the  same  even  in  those  primeval  periods  for  which  we  have 
no  documents  to  guide  us.  But  if  the  change  witnessed  in  the 
evolution  of  modern  speech  out  of  older  forms  of  speech  is  thus 
on  a  larger  scale  projected  back  into  the  childhood  of  mankind, 
and  if  by  tlfis  process  we  arrive  fina.llv  at  uttered  sounds  of  such 
a  description  that  they  can  no  longer  be  called  a  real  language, 
but  something  antecedent  to  language — why,  then  the  problem 
Avill  have  been  solved  ;  for  transformation  is  something  we  can 
imdcrstand,  Avhile  a  creation  out  of  nothing  can  never  be  compre- 
hended by  human  understanding. 

This,  then,  will  be  the  object  of  the  foUoAving  rapid  sketch  : 
to  search  the  several  departments  of  the  science  of  language  for 
general  laws  of  evolution — most  of  them  have  already  been  dis- 
cussed at  some  length  in  the  preceding  chapters — then  to  magnify 
the  changes  observed,  and  thus  to  form  a  picture  of  the  outer 
and  inner  structui'e  of  some  sort  of  speech  more  primitive  than  the 
most  primitive  language  accessible  to  direct  observation. 

XXI.— §  4.  Sounds. 

First,  as  regards  the  piu-ely  phonetic  side  of  language,  we 
observe  overyuhere  the  tendency  to  make  pronunciation  more 
easy,  so  as  to  lessen  the  muscular  effort ;  difficult  combinations 
of  sounds  are   discarded,    those   only   being  retained    which  are 


§4]  SOUNDS  419 

pronoiuiced  with  ease  (see  Ch.  XIV  §  6  ff.).  IModern  research  has 
shown  tliat  the  Proto-Ai-yan  sound-system  was  much  more  com- 
pHcated  than  was  imagined  in  the  reconstructions  of  the  middle 
of  the  nineteenth  century.  In  most  languages  now  onl}'  such 
somids  are  used  as  are  produced  by  expiration,  while  inbreathed 
sounds  and  clicks  or  suction-stops  are  not  found  in  connected 
speech.  In  civilized  languages  we  meet  with  such  sounds  only 
in  interjections,  as  when  an  inbreathed  voiceless  I  (generally  with 
rhythmic  variations  of  strength  and  corresponding  small  move- 
ments of  the  tongue)  is  used  to  express  delight  in  eating  and  drink- 
ing, or  when  the  click  inadequately  spelt  tut  is  used  to  express 
imi)atience.  In  some  very  primitive  South  African  languages, 
on  the  other  hand,  clicks  are  found  as  integral  parts  of  words  ; 
and  Bleek  has  rendered  it  probable  that  in  former  stages  of  these 
languages  they  were  in  more  exten-si^'e  use  than  now.  We  may 
l^erhaps  draw  the  conclusion  that  primitive  languages  in  general 
were  rich  in  all  kinds  of  difficult  sounds. 

The  following  point  is  of  more  far-reaching  consequence.  In 
some  languages  we  find  a  gradual  disappearance  of  tone  or  pitch 
accent ;  this  has  been  the  case  in  Danish,  whereas  Norwegian 
and  Swedish  have  kept  the  old  tones  ;  so  also  in  Russian  as  com- 
pared with  Serbo-Croatian.  In  the  works  of  old  Indian,  Greek 
and  Latin  grammarians  we  have  express  statements  to  the  effect 
that  pitch  accent  played  a  prominent  part  in  those  languages, 
and  that  the  intervals  used  must  have  been  comparatively  greater 
than  is  usual  in  our  modern  languages.  In  modern  Greek  and  in 
the  Romanic  languages  the  tone  element  has  been  obscured,  and 
now  '  stress  '  is  heard  on  the  sj^llable  where  the  ancients  noted 
only  a  liigh  or  a  low  tone.  About  the  languages  spoken  nowadays 
by  savage  tribes  we  have  generallj'  very  little  information,  as  most 
of  those  who  have  made  a  first-hand  study  of  such  languages 
have  not  been  trained  to  observe  and  to  describe  these  delicate 
points  ;  still,  there  is  of  late  years  an  increasing  number  of  observa- 
tions of  tone  accents,  for  instance  in  African  languages,  which 
may  justify  us  in  thinking  that  tone  plays  an  important  part  in 
many  primitive  languages.* 

^  It  may  not  be  superfluous  expressly  to  point  out  that  there  is  no  con- 
tradiction between  what  is  said  here  on  the  disappearance  of  tones  and  the 
remarks  made  above  (Ch.  XIX  §  4)  on  Chinese  tones.  There  the  change 
wrought  in  the  meaning  of  a  word  by  a  mere  change  of  tone  was  explained  on 
the  principle  that  the  difference  of  meaning  was  at  an  earlier  stage  expressed 
by  affixes,  the  tone  that  is  now  concentrated  on  one  syllable  belonging 
formerly  to  two  syllables  or  perhaps  more.  But  this  evidently  presupposes 
that  each  syllable  had  already  some  tone  of  its  own — and  that  is  what  in 
this  chapter  is  taken  to  be  the  primitive  state.  Word-tones  were  originally 
frequent,  but  meaningless  ;  afterwards  they  were  dropped  in  some  languages, 
while  in  others  they  were  utilized  for  sense-distinguishing  purposes. 


430  THE  ORIGIN  OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

So  much  for  word  tones  ;  now  for  the  sentence  melody.  It 
is  a  well-known  fact  that  the  modulation  of  sentences  is  strongly 
influenced  by  the  effect  of  intense  emotions  in  causing  stronger 
and  more  rapid  raisings  and  sinkings  of  the  tone.  "  All  passionate 
language  does  of  itself  become  musical — with  a  finer  music  than 
the  mere  accent ;  the  speech  of  a  man  even  in  zealous  anger  becomes 
a  chant,  a  song  "  (Carlyle).  "  The  sounds  of  common  conversation 
have  but  little  resonance  ;  those  of  strong  feeling  have  much 
more.  Under  rising  ill-temper  the  voice  acquires  a  metaUic  ring. 
.  .  ,  Grief,  unburdening  itself,  uses  tones  approaching  in  timbre 
to  those  of  chanting  ;  and  in  his  most  pathetic  passages  an  elo- 
quent speaker  similarly  falls  into  tones  more  vibratory  than  those 
common  to  him.  .  .  .  While  calm  speech  is  comparatively  mono- 
tonous, emotion  makes  use  of  fifths,  octaves,  and  even  wider 
intervals  "  (H.  Spencer). 

Now,  it  is  a  consequence  of  advancing  civilization  that  passion, 
or,  at  least,  the  expression  of  passion,  is  moderated,  and  we  must 
therefore  conclude  that  the  speech  of  unci\'ilized  and  primitive 
men  was  more  passionately  agitated  than  oms,  more  like  music 
or  song.  This  conclusion  is  borne  out  by  what  we  hear  about  the 
speech  of  many  savages  in  our  own  days.  European  travellers 
very  often  record  their  impression  of  the  speech  of  different  tribes 
in  expressions  like  these :  "  pronouncing  whatever  they  spoke  in 
a  very  singing  manner,"  "  the  singing  tone  of  voice,  in  common 
conversation,  was  frequent,"  "  the  speech  is  very  much  modulated 
and  resembles  singing,"  "  highly  artificial  and  musical,"  etc. 

These  facts  and  considerations  all  point  to  the  conclusion  that 
there  once  was  a  time  when  all  speech  was  song,  or  rather  when 
these  two  actions  were  not  yet  differentiated  ;  but  perhaps  this 
inference  cannot  be  established  inductively  at  the  present  stage 
of  linguistic  science  with  the  same  amount  of  certainty  as  the  ' 
statements  I  am  now  going  to  make  as  to  the  nature  of  primitive 
speech. 

As  we  have  seen  above  (Ch.  XVII  §  7),  a  great  many  of  the 
changes  going  on  regularly  from  century  to  century,  as  well  as  some 
of  the  sudden  changes  which  take  place  now  and  then  in  the 
history  of  each  language,  result  in  the  shortening  of  words.  This 
is  seen  everywhere  and  at  all  times,  and  in  consequence  of  this 
universal  tendency  we  find  that  the  ancient  languages  of  our  family, 
Sanskrit,  Zend,  etc.,  abound  in  very  long  words  ;  the  further 
back  we  go,  the  greater  the  number  of  sesquipedalia.  We  have 
seen  also  how  the  current  theory,  according  to  which  every  language 
started  with  monosyllabic  roots,  fails  at  every  point  to  account 
for  actual  facts  and  breaks  down  before  the  established  truths  of 
linguistic  history.     Just  as  the  history  of  religion  does  not  pass 


§4]  SOUNDS  421 

from  the  belief  in  one  god  to  the  belief  in  many  gods,  but  inversely 
from  polytheism  towards  monotheism,  so  language  proceeds  from 
original  polysyllabism  towards  monosyllabiem  :  if  the  development 
of  language  took  the  same  course  in  prehistoric  as  in  historic  times, 
we  see,  by  projecting  the  teaching  of  history  on  a  larger  scale  back 
into  the  darkest  ages,  that  early  words  must  have  been  to  present 
ones  Vvhat  the  plesiosaurus  and  gigantosaurus  are  to  present-day 
reptiles.  The  outcome  of  this  phonetic  section  is,  therefore,  that 
we  must  imagine  primitive  language  as  consisting  (chiefly  at  least) 
of  very  long  words,  full  of  difficult  sounds,  and  sung  rather  than 
spoken. 


XXI. — §5.  Grammar. 

Can  anything  be  stated  about  the  grammar  of  primitive  lan- 
guages ?  Ye.s,  I  think  so,  if  we  continue  backwards  into  the  past 
the  lines  of  evolution  resulting  from  the  investigations  of  previous 
chapters  of  this  volume.  Ancient  languages  have  more  forms 
than  modern  ones  ;  forms  originally  kept  distinct  are  in  course 
of  time  confused,  either  phonetically  or  analogically,  alike  in 
substantives,  adjectives  and  verbs. 

A  characteristic  feature  of  the  structure  of  languages  in  their 
early  stages  is  that  each  form  of  a  word  (whether  verb  or  noun) 
contains  in  itself  several  minor  modifications  which,  in  the  later 
stages,  are  expressed  separately  (if  at  all),  that  is,  by  means  of 
auxiliary  verbs  or  prej)ositions.  Such  a  word  as  Latin  cantavisset 
unites  in  one  inseparable  whole  the  equivalents  of  six  ideas  : 
(1)  'sing,'  (2)  pluperfect,  (3)  that  indefinite  modification  of  the 
verbal  idea  which  we  term  subjunctive,  (4)  active,  (5)  third  per- 
son, and  (6)  singular.  The  tendency  of  later  stages  is  towards 
expressing  such  modifications  analytically ;  but  if  we  accept  the 
terms  '  synthesis  '  and  '  analysis  '  for  ancient  and  recent  stages, 
we  must  first  realize  that  there  exist  many  gradations  of  both  : 
in  no  single  language  do  we  find  either  synthesis  or  analysis  carried 
out  with  absolute  purity  and  consistency.  Everywhere  we  find 
a  more  or  less.  Latin  is  synthetic  in  comparison  with  French, 
French  analytic  in  comparison  with  Latin  ;  but  if  we  were  able 
to  see  the  direct  ancestor  of  Latin,  say  two  thousand  years  before 
the  earliest  inscriptions,  we  should  no  doubt  find  a  language  so 
sjTithetic  that  in  comparison  with  it  Cicero's  would  have  to  be 
termed  highly  analytic. 

Secondly,  we  must  not  from  the  term  '  synthesis,'  which  etymo- 
logically  means  '  composition  '  or  '  putting  together,'  draw  the 
conclusion  that  synthetic  forms,  such  as  we  find,  for  instance,  in 
Latin,  consist   of   originally   Independent   elements   put   together 


422  THE  ORIGIN  OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

and  thus  in  their  turn  presuppose  a  previous  stage  of  analysis. 
Whoever  does  not  share  the  usual  opinion  that  all  flexional  forms 
have  originated  through  coalescence  of  separate  words,  but  sees 
as  we  have  seen  (in  Ch.  XIX)  also  the  reverse  process  of  inseparable 
portions  of  words  gaining  greater  and  greater  independence,  will 
perhaps  do  well  to  look  out  for  a  better  and  less  ambiguous  word 
than  synthesis  to  describe  the  character  of  primitive  speech.  What 
in  the  later  stages  of  languages  is  analyzed  or  dissolved,  in  the  earlier 
stages  was  unanalj'zable  or  indissoluble  ;  '  entangled  '  or  '  com- 
plicated '  would  therefore  be  better  renderings  of  our  impression 
of  the  first  state  of  things. 


XXI.— §  6.  Units. 

But  are  the  old  forms  really  less  dissoluble  than  their  modern 
equivalents  ?     This  is  repeatedly  denied  even  by  recent  writers, 
on  whom  my  words  in  Progress,  p.  117,  cannot  have  made  much 
impression,  if  thej-  have  read  them  at  all ;    and  it  will  therefore 
be  necessary  to  take  up  this  cardinal  point.     Let  me  begin  with 
quoting  what   others   have   said.     "  Historically   considered,   the 
Latin  amat  is  really  two  words,  as  much  as  its  English  representative, 
the  final  t  being  originally  a  pronoun  signifying  '  he,'   '  she  '  or 
'  it,'  and  it  is  only  reasons  of  practical  convenience  that  prevent 
us  from  writing  am  at  or  ama  t  as  two  and  heloves  as  one  word. 
.  .  .  The  really  essential  difference  between  amat  and  he  loves  is 
that  in  the  former  the  pronominal  element  is  expressed  b}'  a  suffix, 
in  the  latter  by  a  prefix  "  (Sweet  PS  274,  1899).     "  It  is  purely 
accidental  that  the  Latin  form  is  not  written  am-av-it.    To  the 
unsophisticated  Frenchman  il  a  aim6  is  neither  less  nor  more  one 
unit  than  amavit  to  a  Roman.  .  .  .  When  the  locution  il  a  aime 
sprang  up,  each  element  of  it  was  still  to  some  extent  felt  separatelj-  ; 
but  after  it  had  become  a  fixed  formula  the  elements  were  fused 
together  into  one  whole.     As  a  matter  of  fact,  uneducated  French 
people  have  not  the  least  idea  whether  it  is  one  or  three  words 
they  speak"  (Siitterlin  WGS  11,  1902).     "In  some  modern  lan- 
guages the  personal  pronoun  is,  just  as  in  archaic  Greek,  beginning 
to  be  amalgamated  with  verbs  so  as  to  become  a  mere  termination 
{sic  :  desinence  ;  prefix  must  be  what  is  meant) :  Fr.  ydon\  tu-don', 
il-don'  (je  donne,  tu  donnes,  il  donne)  and  E.  i-giv\  we  giv',  you-giv\ 
they-giv\  correspond  exactlj^  to  Gr.  dido-mi,  dido-si,  dido-ti,  only 
that  the  personal  particle  is  in  a  different  place  "  (Dauzat  V  155, 
1910).     "  If  French  were  a  savage  language  not  jet  reduced  to 
writing,  a  travelling  linguist,  hearing  the  present  tense  of  the  verb 
aimer  pronounced  by  the  natives,  would  transcribe  it  in  the  follow- 
ing way :  jem,  tu  em.  Hem,  nouzimon,  vouzimi,  ilzem.    He  would  be 


§G]  UNITS  428 

struck  particularly  with  the  agglutination  of  the  pronominal 
subject  and  the  verb,  and  would  never  feel  tempted  to  draw  up 
a  paradigm  without  pronouns  :  ai7ne,  aimes,  aime,  aimons,  etc., 
in  which  traditional  spelling  makes  us  believe.  .  .  .  He  would 
even,  through  a  comparison  of  Hem  and  ilzem,  be  led  to  establish 
a  tendency  to  incorporation,  as  the  only  sign  of  the  plural  is  a  z 
infixed  in'the  verbal  complex  "  (Bally  LV  43,  1913). 

In  these  utterances  two  questions  are  really  mixed  together, 
that  of  the  origin  of  Aryan  flexional  forms  and  that  of  the  actual 
status  of  some  forms  in  various  languages.  As  to  the  former 
question,  we  have  seen  (p.  383)  how  very  uncertain  it  is  that  amat 
and  didosi,  etc.,  contain  pronouns.  As  to  the  latter  question, 
it  is  quite  true  that  we  should  not  let  the  usual  spelling  be  decisive 
when  it  is  asked  whether  we  have  one  or  two  or  three  words ;  but 
all  these  writers  strangely  overlook  the  really  important  criteria 
which  we  possess  in  this  matter.  Balh-'s  traveller  could  only  have 
arrived  at  his  result  by  listening  to  grammar  lessons  in  which  the 
three  persons  of  the  verb  were  rattled  off  one  after  the  other,  for 
if  he  had  taken  his  forms  from  actual  conversation  he  would  have 
come  across  numerous  instances  in  which  the  forms  occurred 
without  pronouns,  first  in  the  imperative,  aime,  aimons,  aimez,  then 
in  collocations  like  celin  qni  aime,  ceux  qui  aiment,  in  which  there 
is  no  infix  to  denote  the  plural ;  in  le  mari  aime,  les  maris  aiment, 
and  innumerable  similar  groups  there  is  neither  pronoun  nor  infix. 
If  he  were  at  first  inclined  to  take  ilaaime  as  one  word,  he  would 
on  further  acquaintance  with  the  language  discover  that  the  ele- 
ments were  often  separated  :  il  na  pas  aimA,  il  nous  a  tonjours 
aim^s,  etc.  Similarly  with  the  English  forms  adduced  :  /  never 
give,  you  always  give.  This  is  the  crucial  point :  the  French  and 
English  combinations  are  two  (three)  words  because  the  elements 
are  not  always  placed  together  ;  Lat.  amat,  amavit,  are  each  of 
them  only  one  word  because  they  can  never  be  divided,  and  in  the 
same  way  we  never  find  anything  placed  between  am  and  o  in 
the  first  person,  amo.  These  forms  are  as  inseparable  as  E.  loves, 
but  E.  heloves  is  separable  because  both  he  and  loves  can  stand 
alone,  and  can  also,  in  certain  combinations,  though  now  rarely, 
be  transposed  :  loves  he.  Some  writers  would  compare  French 
combinations  like  il  te  le  disait  with  verbal  forms  in  certain  Amerin- 
dian languages,  in  which  subject  and  direct  and  indirect  object 
are  alike  '  incorporated  '  in  a  '  polysynthetic  '  verbal  form  ;  it  is 
quite  true  that  these  French  pronominal  forms  can  never  be  used 
by  themselves,  but  only  in  conjunction  with  a  verb  ;  still,  the  French 
pronouns  are  more  independent  of  each  other  than  the  elements 
of  some  other  more  primitive  languages.  In  the  first  place,  this 
is  shown  by  the  possibility  of  varying  the  pronunciation  :    il  te 


424  THE  ORIGIN  OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

le  disaii  may  be  either  [itlodize]  or  [itoldizc]  or  even  more  solemnly 
[iltaladize]  ;  secondly,  by  the  regularity  of  these  joined  pronominal 
forms,  for  they  are  always  the  same,  whatever  the  verb  may  be  ; 
and  lastly,  by  their  changing  places  in  certain  cases  :  it  It  disait- 
il  ?  dis-lt-lui,  etc. 

Nor  can  it  be  said  that  English  forms  like  ht's—he  is  (or  he  has), 
I'd  =  /  had  (or  /  tvould),  hell  =  he  will  show  a  tendency  towards 
'  entangling,'  for  however  closely  together  these  forms  are  gener- 
ally pronounced,  each  of  them  must  be  said  to  consist  of  two  words, 
as  is  shown  by  the  possibility  of  transposition  (Is  he  ill  ?)  and  of 
intercalation  of  other  words  (I  never  had)  ;  it  is  also  noteworthy 
that  the  same  short  forms  of  the  verbs  can  be  added  to  all 
kinds  of  words  (the  water '11  be  .  .  .,  the  sea'd  been  calm).  In 
the  forms  dojit,  won't,  can't  there  is  something  like  amalgama- 
tion of  the  verbal  with  the  negative  idea.  Still,  it  is  important 
to  notice  that  the  amalgamation  only  takes  place  with  a  few 
verbs  of  the  auxiliary  class.  In  saying  '  I  don't  write  '  the  full 
verb  is  not  touched  by  the  fusion,  and  is  even  allowed  to  be 
unchanged  in  cases  w^here  it  would  have  been  inflected  if  no 
auxiliary  had  been  used  ;  compare  /  write,  he  writes,  I  wrote  with 
the  negative  /  don't  write,  he  doesnt  urite,  I  didnH  icrite.  It  will 
be  seen,  especially  if  we  take  into  account  the  colloquial  or  vulgar 
form  for  the  third  person,  he  don't  write,  that  the  general  movement 
here  as  elsewhere  is  really  rather  in  the  direction  of  '  isolation  ' 
than  of  fusion  ;  for  the  verbal  form  write  is  stripped  of  all  signs 
of  person  and  tense,  the  person  being  indicated  separately  (if  at 
all),  and  the  tense  sign  being  joined  to  the  negation.  So  also  in 
interrogative  sentences  ;  and  if  that  tendency  which  can  be  observed 
in  Elizabethan  English  had  prevailed  by  using  the  combination 
/  do  ivrite  in  positive  statements,  even  where  no  special  emphasis 
is  intended,  English  verbs  (except  a  few  auxiliaries)  would  have 
been  entirely  stripped  of  those  elements  which  to  most  gram- 
marians constitute  the  very  essence  of  a  verb,  namely,  the  marks 
of  person,  number,  tense  and  mood,  write  being  the  universal 
form,  besides  the  quasi-nominal  forms  writing  and  uritten. 

Now,  it  is  often  said  that  the  history  of  language  shows  a  sort 
of  gyration  or  movement  in  spirals,  in  wliich  synthesis  is  followed 
by  analysis,  this  by  a  new  synthesis  (flexion),  and  this  again  by 
analysis,  and  so  forth.  Latin  amabo  (which  according  to  the  old 
theory  was  once  ama  -f  some  auxiliar}')  has  been  succeeded  by 
amare  habeo,  which  in  its  turn  is  fused  into  amerd,  aimerai,  and  the 
latter  form  is  now  to  some  extent  giving  way  to^'e  vats  aimer.  But 
this  pretended  law  of  rotation  is  only  arrived  at  by  considering  a 
comparatively  small  number  of  phenomena,  and  not  by  viewing 
the  successive  stages  of  the  same  language  as  wholes  and  drawing 


§6]  UNITS  425 

general  inferences  as  to  their  typically  distinctive  characters  (cf. 
above,  p.  337).  If  for  every  two  instances  of  new  flexions  springing 
up  we  see  ten  older  ones  discarded  in  favour  of  analysis  or  isolation, 
are  we  not  entitled  to  the  generalization  that  flexion  or  indissolu- 
bility tends  to  give  way  to  anah'sis  ?  We  should  beware  of  being 
under  the  same  delusion  as  a  man  who,  in  walking  over  a  moun- 
tainous countrj',  thinks  that  he  goes  down  just  as  many  and  just 
as  lona:  hills  as  he  goes  up,  while  on  the  contrary  each  ascent  is 
higher  than  the  preceding  descent,  so  that  finally  he  finds  himself 
unexpectedly  many  thousand  feet  above  the  level  from  which 
he  started. 

The  direction  of  movement  is  towards  flexionless  languages 
(such  as  Chinese,  or  to  a  certain  extent  IModevn  English)  with 
freely  combinable  elements ;  the  starting-point  was  flexional 
languages  (such  as  Latin  or  Greek)  ;  at  a  still  earlier  stage  we  must 
suppose  a  language  in  which  a  verbal  form  might  indicate  not  only 
six  things,  like  cantainsset,  but  a  still  larger  number,  in  which  verbs 
were  perhaps  modified  according  to  the  gender  (or  sex)  of  the  sub- 
ject, as  they  are  in  Semitic  languages,  or  according  to  the  object, 
as  in  some  Amerindian  languages,  or  according  to  whether  a  man, 
a  woman,  or  a  person  who  commands  respect  is  spoken  to,  as  in 
Basque.  But  that  amounts  to  the  same  thing  as  saying  that  the 
border-line  between  word  and  sentence  was  not  so  clearly  defined 
as  in  more  recent  times  ;  cantavisset  is  really  nothing  but  a  sentence- 
word,  and  the  same  holds  good  to  a  still  greater  extent  of  the  sound 
conglomerations  of  Eskimo  and  some  other  North  American  lan- 
guages. Primitive  linguistic  units  must  have  been  much  more 
complicated  in  point  of  meaning,  as  well  as  much  longer  in  point 
of  sound,  than  those  with  which  we  are  most  familiar. 


XXI.— §  7.  Irregularities. 

Another  point  of  great  importance  is  this  :  in  early  languages 
we  find  a  far  greater  number  of  irregularities,  exceptions,  anomalies, 
than  in  modern  ones.  It  is  true  that  we  not  unfrequently  see  new 
irregularities  spring  up,  where  the  formations  were  formerly 
regular  ;  but  these  instances  are  very  far  from  counterbalancing 
the  opposite  class,  in  which  words  once  irregularly  inflected  become 
regular,  or  are  given  up  in  favour  of  regularly  inflected  words, 
or  in  which  anomalies  in  S3aitax  are  levelled.  The  tendency  is 
more  and  more  to  denote  the  same  thing  by  the  same  means  in 
every  case,  to  extend  the  ending,  or  whatever  it  is,  that  is  used  in 
a  large  class  of  words  to  express  a  certain  modification  of  the  central 
idea,  until  it  is  used  in  all  other  words  as  well. 

Comparative  linguistics  did  not  attain  a  scientific  character 


426  THE  ORIGIN  OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

till  the  principle  was  established  that  the  relationsliip  of  two  lan- 
guages had  to  be  determined  by  a  thoroughgoing  conformity  in 
the  most  necessary  parts  of  language,  namely  (besides  grammar 
proper)  pronouns  and  numerals  and  the  most  indispensable  of 
nouns  and  verbs.  But  if  this  domain  of  speech,  by  preserving 
religiously,  as  it  were,  the  old  tradition,  affords  infallible  criteria 
of  the  near  or  remote  relationship  of  different  languages,  may  we 
not  reasonably  expect  to  find  in  the  same  domain  some  clue  to  the 
oldest  grammatical  system  used  by  our  ancestors  ?  What  sort 
of  system,  then,  do  we  find  there  ?  We  see  such  a  declension  as 
/,  we,  we,  us  :  the  several  forms  of  the  '  paradigm  '  do  not  at  all 
resemble  each  other,  as  they  do  in  more  recently  developed  de- 
clensions. We  find  masculines  and  feminincs,  such  a.s  father,  mother, 
man,  wife,  bull,  cow ;  Avhile  such  methods  of  derivation  as  are  seen 
in  count,  countess,  he-bear,  she-bear,  belong  to  a  later  time.  We 
meet  with  degrees  of  comparison  like  good,  better,  ill,  worse,  while 
regular  forms  like  hajypy,  hajypitr,  big,  bigger,  prevail  in  all  the 
younger  strata  of  languages.  We  meet  with  verbal  flexion  such 
as  appears  in  am,  is,  was,  been,  which  forms  a  striking  contrast 
to  the  more  modern  method  of  adding  a  mere  ending  while  leaving 
the  body  of  the  word  unchanged.  In  an  interesting  book,  Vom 
Suppletivwesen  der  indogermanischen  Sprachen  (1899),  H.  OsthofiE 
has  collected  a  very  great  number  of  examples  from  the  old  Aryan 
languages  of  different  stems  supplementing  each  other,  and  has 
pointed  out  that  this  phenomenon  is  characteristic  of  the  most 
necessary  ideas  occurring  every  moment  in  ordinary  conversation  : 
I  take  at  random  a  few  of  the  best-known  of  his  examples  :  Fr. 
aller,  je  vais,  j'irai,  Lat.  fero,  tuli,  Gr.  horao,  opsomai,  eidon,  Lat. 
bonus,  melior,  optimus.  Osthoff  fully  agrees  with  me  that  we  have 
here  a  trait  of  primitive  jDsychology  :  our  remote  ancestors  were 
not  able  to  see  and  to  express  what  was  common  to  these  ideas ; 
their  minds  were  very  uns3^stematic,  and  separated  in  their  lin- 
guistic expressions  things  which  from  a  logical  point  of  view  are 
closely  related  :  much  of  their  grammar,  therefore,  was  really  of 
a  lexical  character. 


XXI.— §  8.  Savage  Tribes. 

If  now  it  is  asked  whether  the  conclusions  we  have  thus  arrived 
at  are  borne  out  by  a  consideration  of  the  languages  of  savage 
or  primitive  races  nowadays,  the  answer  is  that  these  cannot  be 
lumped  together;  there  are  among  them  many  different  types, 
even  with  regard  to  grammatical  structure.  But  the  more  these 
languages  are  studied  and  the  more  accuratel}^  their  structure  is 
described,  the  more  also  students  perceive  intricacies  and  anomalies 


§8]  SAVAGE   TRIBES  427 

in  their  grtammari  Gabelentz  (Spr  386)  says  that  the  casual 
observer  has  no  idea  how  manifold  and  how  nicely  circumscribed 
grammatical  categories  can  be,  even  in  the  seemingly  crudest  lan- 
guages, for  ordinary  grammars  tell  us  nothing  about  that.  P.  W. 
Schmidt  (Die  Stellung  der  Pygmdenvolker,  1910,  129)  says  that 
whoever,  from  the  low  culture  of  the  Andamanese,  would  expect 
to  find  their  language  very  simple  and  poor  in  expressions  would 
be  strangely  deceived,  for  its  mechanism  is  highly  complicated, 
with  man}'  prefixes  and  suffixes,  which  often  conceal  the  root  itself. 
Meinhof  (MSA  136)  mentions  the  multiplicity  of  plural  formations 
in  African  languages,  Vilhelm  Thomsen,  in  speaking  of  the  Santhal 
(Khervarian)  language,  says  that  its  grammar  is  capable  of  express- 
ing a  multiplicity  of  vvances  which  in  other  languages  must  be 
expressed  by  clumsy  circumlocutions  ;  the  native  speakers  go 
beyond  what  is  necessary  through  requiring  expressions  for  many 
subordinate  notions,  the  language  having,  so  to  speak,  only  one 
fine  gold-balance,  on  which  everything,  even  the  simplest  and 
commonest  things,  must  be  weighed  by  the  adding-up  of  a  whole 
series  of  minutiae.  Curr  speaks  about  the  erroneous  belief  in  the 
simplicity  of  Australian  languages,  which  on  the  contrary  have 
a  great  number  of  conjugations,  etc.  The  extreme  difficulty  and 
complex  structure  of  Eskimo  and  of  many  Amerindian  languages 
is  so  notorious  that  no  words  need  be  wasted  on  them  here.  And 
the  forms  of  the  Basque  verb  are  so  manifold  and  intricate  that  we 
understand  how  Larramendi,  in  his  legitimate  pride  at  having 
been  the  first  to  reduce  them  to  a  system,  called  his  grammar 
El  Imposible  Vencido,  '  The  Impossible  Overcome.'  At  Beam 
they  have  the  story  that  the  good  God,  wishing  to  punish  the  devil 
for  the  temptation  of  Eve,  sent  him  to  the  Pays  Basque  with  the 
command  that  he  should  remain  there  till  lie  had  mastered  the  lan- 
guage. At  the  end  of  seven  years  God  relented,  finding  the  punish- 
ment too  severe,  and  called  the  devil  to  him.  The  devil  had  no 
sooner  crossed  the  bridge  of  Castelondo  than  he  found  he  had  for- 
gotten all  that  he  had  so  hardly  learned. 

What  is  here  said  about  the  languages  of  wild  tribes  (and  of 
the  Basques,  who  are  not  exactly  savages,  but  whose  language 
is  generally  taken  to  have  retained  many  primeval  traits)  is  in 
exact  keeping  with  everything  that  recent  study  of  primitive 
man  has  brought  to  light :  the  life  of  the  savage  is  regulated  to  the 
minutest  details  through  ceremonies  and  conventionalities  to  be 
observed  on  every  and  any  occasion ;  he  is  restricted  in  what  he 
may  eat  and  drink  and  when  and  how  ;  and  all  these,  to  our  mind, 
irrational  prescriptions  and  innumerable  jirohibitions  have  to  be 
observed  with  the  most  scrupulous,  nay  religious,  care  :  it  is  the 
same  with  all  the  meticulous  rules  of  his  language. 


428  THE  ORIGIN  OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

XXI. — §  9.  Law  o!  Development. 

So  far,  then,  from  subscribing  to  Whitney's  dictum  that  "  the 
law  of  simplicity  of  beginnings  applies  to  language  not  less  natur- 
ally and  necessarily  than  to  other  instrumentalities  "  (G  226), 
we  are  drawn  to  the  conclusion  that  primitive  language  had  a  super- 
abundance of  irregularities  and  anomalies,  in  sjTitax  and  word- 
formation  no  less  than  in  accidence.  It  was  capricious  and  fanciful, 
and  displayed  a  luxuriant  growth  of  forms,  entangled  one  with 
another  like  the  trees  in  a  primeval  forest.  "  Rien  n'entre  mieux 
dans  les  esprits  grossicrs  que  les  subtilites  des  langues  "  (Tarde, 
Lois  de  V imitation  285).  Human  minds  in  the  early  times  dis- 
ported themselves  in  long  and  intricate  words  as  in  the  wildest 
and  most  wanton  play.  Nothing  could  be  more  beside  the  mark 
than  to  suppose  that  grammatical  and  logical  categories  were  in 
primitive  languages  generally  in  harmony  (as  is  supposed,  e.g.,  by 
Sweet,  New  Engl.  Grammar  §  543) :  primitive  speech  cannot  have 
been  distinguished  for  logical  consistency ;  nor,  so  far  as  w's 
can  judge,  was  it  simple  and  facile :  it  is  much  more  likely 
to  have  been  extremely  clumsy  and  un^vieldy.  Renan  rightly 
reminds  us  of  Turgot's  wise  sa^ang :  "  Des  hommes  gros.siers  ne 
font  rien  de  simple.  II  faut  des  hommes  perfectionnes  pour  y 
arriver." 

We  have  seen  in  earlier  chapters  that  the  old  theory  of  the 
three  stages  through  which  human  language  was  supposed  alwaj's 
to  proceed,  isolation,  agglutination  and  flexion,  was  built  up 
on  insufficient  materials ;  but  while  we  feel  tempted  totally  to 
reverse  this  sj'^stem,  we  must  be  on  our  guard  against  establishing 
too  rigid  and  too  absolute  a  system  ourselves.  It  would  not  do 
simply  to  reverse  the  order  and  sa}^  that  flexion  is  the  oldest  stage, 
from  which  language  tends  through  an  agglutinative  stage  towards 
complete  isolation,  for  flexion,  agglutination  and  isolation  do  not 
include  all  possible  structural  types  of  speech.  The  possibilities 
of  development  are  so  manifold,  and  there  are  such  innumerable 
ways  of  arriving  at  more  or  less  adequate  expressions  for  human 
thought,  that  it  is  next  to  impossible  to  compare  languages  of 
different  families.  Even,  therefore,  if  it  is  probable  that  English, 
Finnish  and  Chinese  are  all  simplifications  of  more  complex  lan- 
guages, we  cannot  say  that  Chinese,  for  instance,  at  one  time 
resembled  English  in  structure  and  at  some  other  time  Finnish. 
English  was  once  a  flexional  language,  and  is  still  so  in  some 
respects,  while  in  others  it  is  agglutinative,  and  in  others  again 
isolating,  or  nearly  so.  But  we  may  perhaps  give  the  following 
formula  of  what  is  our  tot^l  imi^ression  of  the  whole  preceding 
inquiry  : 


§9]  LAW   OF  DEVELOPMENT  429 

The  evolution  of  language  shows  a  progressive  ten- 
dency FROM  inseparable  IRREGULAR  CONGLOMERATIONS  TO 
FREELY    AND    REGULARLY    COMBINABLE    SHORT    ELEMENTS. 

The  old  system  of  historical  linguistics  may  be  likened  to  an 
enormous  pyramid  ;  only  it  is  a  pitj'  that  it  should  have  as  its 
base  the  small,  square,  strong,  smart  root  word,  and  suspended 
above  it  the  unwieldy,  lumbering,  ill-proportioned,  flexion-encum- 
bered sentence-vocable.  Structures  of  this  sort  may  with  some 
adroitness  be  made  to  stand  ;  but  their  equilibrium  is  unstable, 
and  sooner  or  later  they  will  inevitably  tumble  over. 

XXI.— §  10.  Vocabulary. 

On  the  lexical  side  of  language  we  find  a  development  parallel 
to  that  noticed  in  grammar  ;  and,  indeed,  if  we  go  deep  enough 
into  the  question,  we  shall  see  that  it  is  really  the  very  same 
movement  that  has  taken  place.  The  more  advanced  a  language 
is,  the  more  developed  is  its  power  of  expressing  abstract  or 
general  ideas.  Everywhere  language  has  first  attained  to  ex- 
pressions for  the  concrete  and  special.  In  accounts  of  the  languages 
of  barbarous  races  we  constantly  come  across  such  phrases  as 
these  :  "  The  aborigines  of  Tasmania  had  no  words  representing 
abstract  ideas  ;  for  each  variety  of  gum-tree  and  wattle-tree, 
etc.,  they  had  a  name  ;  but  they  had  no  equivalent  for  the 
expression  '  a  tree  '  ;  neither  could  they  express  abstract  qualities, 
such  as  '  hard,  soft,  warm,  cold,  long,  short,  round  '  "  ;  or, 
The  Mohicans  have  words  for  cutting  various  objects,  but  none 
to  convey  cutting  simply.  The  Zulus  have  no  word  for  '  cow,' 
but  words  for  '  red  cow,'  '  white  cow,'  etc.  (Sayce  S  2.  5,  cf. 
I.  121).  In  Bakairi  (Central  Brazil)  "each  parrot  has  its  special 
name,  and  the  general  idea  '  parrot '  is  totally  unknown,  as  well 
as  the  general  idea  '  palm.'  But  they  know  precisely  the  qualities 
of  each  subspecies  of  parrot  and  palm,  and  attach  themselves  so 
much  to  these  numerous  particular  notions  that  they  take  no  interest 
in  the  common  characteristics.  They  are  choked  in  the  abundance 
of  the  material  and  cannot  manage  it  economically.  They  have 
only  small  coin,  but  in  that  they  must  be  said  to  be  excessively 
rich  rather  than  poor  "  (K.  v.  d.  Steinen,  Unter  den  Naturvolkem 
Brasiliens,  1894,  81).  The  Lithuanians,  like  many  primitive 
tribes,  have  many  special,  but  no  common  names  for  various 
colours  :  one  word  for  gray  in  spealdng  about  wool  and  geese, 
one  about  horses,  one  about  cattle,  one  about  the  hair  of  men  and 
some  animals,  and  in  the  same  way  for  other  colours  (J.  Schmidt, 
Kritik  d.  Sonantentheorie  37).  Many  languages  have  no  word 
for  '  brother,'  but  words  for  '  elder  brother  '  and  '  younger  brother  ' ; 


430  THE   ORIGIN  OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

others  have  different  words  according  to  whose  (person  and  ninnber) 
father  or  brother  it  is  (see,  e.g.,  the  paradigm  in  Gabclentz  8pr  421), 
and  the  same  applies  in  many  languages  to  names  for  various 
parts  of  the  body.  In  Cherokee,  instead  of  one  word  for  '  washing  ' 
we  find  different  words,  according  to  what  is  washed  :  kuhiwo 
"  I  wash  myself,'  hdestula  '  I  wash  my  head,'  tsestula  '  I  wash 
the  head  of  somebody  else,'  kttkusxco  '  I  wash  my  face,'  tsekuswo 
'  I  wash  the  face  of  somebody  else,'  takasula  '  I  wash  my  hands 
or  feet,'  takunkela  '  I  wash  my  clothes,'  takuiega  '  I  wash  dishes,' 
tsejmvu  '  I  wash  a  child,'  kowela  '  I  wash  meat '  (see,  hoAvever,  the 
criticism  of  Hewitt,  Am.  Anthropologist,  1893,  398).  Primitive 
man  did  not  see  the  wood  for  the  trees. ^ 

In  some  Amerindian  languages  there  are  distinct  series  of 
numerals  for  various  classes  of  objects  ;  thus  in  Kwakiatl  and 
Tsimoshian  (Sapir,  Language  and  Environment  239)  ;  similarly 
the  Melanesians  have  special  words  to  denote  a  definite  number- 
of  certain  objects,  e.g.  a  buku  niu  '  two  coconuts,'  a  bum  '  ten 
coconuts,'  a  koro  '  a  himdred  coconuts,'  a  selavo  '  a  thousand 
coconuts,'  a  uduudu  'ten  canoes,'  a  bola  'ten  fishes,'  etc.  (Gabe- 
lentz,  Die  melan.  Spr.  1.  23).  In  some  languages  the  numerals 
are  the  same  for  all  classes  of  objects  counted,  but  require  after 
them  certain  class-denoting  words  varjdng  according  to  the 
character  of  the  objects  (in  some  respects  comparable  to  the 
English  twenty  Jiead  of  cattle,  Pidgin  piecey ;  cf .  Yule  and 
Burnell,  Hobson-Jobson  s.v.  Numerical  Affixes).  This  reminds 
one  of  the  systems  of  weights  and  measures,  which  even  in 
civilized  countries  up  to  a  comparatively  recent  period  varied 
not  only  from  country  to  country,  sometimes  even  from  district 
to  district,  but  even  in  the  same  country  according  to  the 
things  weighed  or  measm-ed  (in  England  stone  and  ton  still  vary 
in  this  way). 

In  old  Gothonic  poetry  we  find  an  astonishing  abundance  of 
words  translated  in  our  dictionaries  by  '  sea,'  '  battle,'  '  sword,' 
'  hero,'  and  the  like  :  these  may  certainly  be  considered  as  relics 
of  an  earlier  state  of  things,  in  which  each  of  these  words  had  its 
separate  shade  of  meaning,  which  was  subsequently  lost  and  which 
it  is  impossible  now  to  determine  with  certainty.  The  nomenclature 
of  a  remote  past  was  undoubtedly  constructed  upon  similar 
principles  to  those  which  are  still  preserved  in  a  word-group  like 
horse,  mare,  stallion,  foal,  colt,  instead  of  he-horse,  she-horse,  young 
horse,  etc.  This  sort  of  grouping  has  only  survived  in  a  few  cases 
in  which  a  lively  interest  has  been  felt  in  the  objects  or  animals 
concerned.     We  may  note,  however,  the  different  terms  employed 

^  On  the  lack  of  abstract  and  general  terms  in  savage  languages,  see 
also  Ginneken  LP  108  and  the  works  there  quoted. 


§10]  VOCABULARY  431 

for  essentially  the  same  idea  in  a  fioch  of  sheep,  a  pack  of  wolves, 
a  herd  of  cattle,  a  beuy  of  larks,  a  covey  of  partridges,  a  shoal  of 
iish.  Primitive  language  could  show  a  far  greater  number  of 
instances  of  this  description,  and,  so  far,  had  a  larger  vocabulary 
than  later  languages,  though,  of  com-se,  it  lacked  names  for  a 
great  number  of  ideas  that  were  outside  the  sphere  of  interest 
of  unci\'ilized  people. 

There  was  another  reason  for  the  richness  of  the  vocabulary 
of  primitive  man  :  his  superstition  about  words,  which  made 
him  avoid  the  use  of  certain  words  under  certain  circumstances — 
during  war,  when  out  fishing,  during  the  time  of  the  great  cultic 
festivals,  etc. — because  he  feared  the  anger  of  gods  or  demons 
if  he  did  not  religiously  observe  the  rules  of  the  linguistic  tabu. 
Accordingly,  in  many  cases  he  had  two  or  more  sets  of  words  for 
exactly  the  same  notions,  of  which  later  generations  as  a  rule 
preserved  only  one,  unless  they  differentiated  these  words  by 
utilizing  them  to  discriminate  objects  that  were  similar  but  not 
identical. 

XXI.— §  11.  Poetry  and  Prose. 

On  the  whole  the  development  of  languages,  even  in  the  matter 
of  vocabulary,  must  be  considered  to  have  taken  a  beneficial  course  ; 
still,  in  certain  respects  one  may  to  some  extent  regret  the  conse- 
quences of  this  evolution.  Wliile  our  words  are  better  adapted 
to  express  abstract  things  and  to  render  concrete  things  with 
definite  precision,  they  are  necessarily  comparatively  colourless. 
The  old  words,  on  the  contrary,  spoke  more  immediately  to  the 
senses — they  were  manifestly  more  suggestive,  more  graphic  and 
pictorial :  while  to  express  one  single  thing  we  are  not  unfrequently 
obliged  to  piece  the  image  together  bit  by  bit,  the  old  concrete 
words  ^\  ould  at  once  present  it  to  the  hearer's  mind  as  a  whole  ; 
they  were,  accordingly,  better  adapted  to  poetic  purposes.  Nor 
is  this  the  only  point  in  which  we  see  a  close  relationship  between 
primitive  words  and  poetry. 

If  by  a  mental  effort  we  transport  ourselves  to  a  period  in 
which  language  consisted  solely  of  such  graphic  concrete  words, 
we  shall  discover  that,  in  spite  of  their  number,  they  -would  not 
suflSce,  taken  all  together,  to  cover  everytliing  that  needed  ex- 
pression ;  a  wealth  in  such  words  is  not  incompatible  with  a 
certain  poverty.  They  would  accordingly  often  be  required  to 
do  service  outside  of  their  proper  sphere  of  application.  That  a 
figurative  or  metaphorical  use  of  words  is  a  factor  of  the  utmost 
importance  in  the  life  of  all  languages  is  indisputable  ;  but  I 
am  probably  right  in  thinking  that  it  played  a  more  prominent 


482  THE   ORIGIN   OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

part  in  old  times  than  now.  In  the  course  of  ages  a  great  many 
metaphors  have  lost  their  freshness  and  vividness,  so  that  nobody 
feels  them  to  be  metaphors  any  longer.  Examine  closely  such  a 
sentence  as  this  :  "  He  came  to  look  upon  the  low  ebb  of  morals 
as  an  outcome  of  bad  taste"  and  you  will  find  that  nearly  every 
word  is  a  dead  metaphor.^  But  the  bettor  stocked  a  language 
is  with  those  ex-metaphors  which  have  become  regular  expressions 
for  definite  ideas,  the  less  need  there  is  for  going  out  of  one's  way 
to  find  new  metaphors.  The  expression  of  thought  therefore 
tends  to  become  more  and  more  mechanical  or  prosaic. 

Primitive  man,  however,  on  account  of  the  nature  of  his  language, 
was  constantly  reduced  to  using  words  and  phrases  figuratively  : 
he  was  forced  to  express  his  thoughts  in  the  language  of  poetry. 
The  speech  of  modern  savages  is  often  spoken  of  as  abounding 
in  similes  and  all  kinds  of  figurative  phrases  and  allegorical 
expressions.  Just  as  in  the  literature  transmitted  to  us  poetry 
is  found  in  every  country  to  precede  prose,  so  poetic  language 
is  on  the  whole  older  than  prosaic  language  ;  lyrics  and  cult  songs 
come  before  science,  and  Oehlenschlager  is  right  when  he  sings 
(in  N.  Meller's  translation)  : 

Thus  Nature  drove  us  ;  warbling  rose 

Man's  voice  in  verse  before  he  spoke  in  prose. 


XXI.— §  12.  Emotional  Songs. 

If  we  noAV  try  to  sum  up  what  has  been  inferred  about  primi- 
tive speech,  we  see  that  by  our  backward  march  we  arrived  at 
a  language  whose  units  had  a  very  meagre  substance  of  thought, 
and  this  as  specialized  and  concrete  as  possible  ;  but  at  the  same 
time  the  jihonetic  body  was  ample  ;  and  the  bigger  and  longer 
the  words,  the  thinner  the  thoughts  !  Much  cry  and  little  wool ! 
No  period  has  seen  less  taciturn  people  than  the  first  framers  of 
speech  ;  primitive  speakers  were  not  reticent  and  reserved  beings, 
but  youthful  men  and  women  babbling  merrily  on,  without  being 
so  very  particular  about  the  meaning  of  each  word.  They  did 
not  narrowly  weigh  every  syllable — what  were  a  couple  of  syllables 
more  or  less  to  them  ?  They  chattered  away  for  the  mere  pleasure 
of  chattering,  resembling  therein  many  a  mother  of  our  own  time, 
who  will  chatter  away  to  baby  without  measuring  her  words  or 
looking  too  closely  into  the  meaning  of  each  ;  na}',  who  is  not 
a  bit  troubled  by  the  consideration  that  the  little  deary  does  not 
understand   a   single   word    of   her   affectionate   eloquence.     But 

^  Of  course,  if  instead  of  look  upon  and  outcoine  we  had  taken  the  corre- 
sponding terms  of  Latin  root,  consider  and  result,  the  metaphors  would 
have  been  still  more  dead  to  the  natural  linguistic  instinct. 


§12]  EMOTIONAL   SONGS  433 

primitive  speech — and  we  return  here  to  an  idea  thrown  out  above — 
still  more  resembles  the  speech  of  little  baby  himself,  before  he 
begins  to  frame  his  own  language  after  the  pattern  of  the  grown- 
ups ;  the  language  of  our  remote  forefathers  was  like  that  ceaseless 
humming  and  crooning  with  which  no  thoughts  are  as  yet  con- 
nected, which  merely  amuses  and  delights  the  little  one.  Language 
originated  as  play,  and  the  organs  of  speech  were  first  trained  in 
this  singing  sport  of  idle  hours. 

Primitive  language  had  no  great  store  of  ideas,  and  if  we  consider 
it  as  an  instrument  for  expressing  thoughts,  it  was  clumsy,  un- 
wieldy and  ineffectual ;  but  M'hat  did  that  matter  ?  Thoughts 
were  not  the  first  things  to  press  forward  and  crave  for  ex- 
pression ;  emotions  and  instincts  were  more  primitive  and  far 
more  powerful.  But  what  emotions  were  most  powerful  in  pro- 
ducing germs  of  speech  ?  To  be  sm-e  not  hunger  and  that  which 
is  connected  with  hunger :  mere  individual  self-assertion  and 
the  struggle  for  material  existence.  This  prosaic  side  of  life  was 
only  capable  of  calling  forth  short  monosyllabic  interjections, 
howls  of  pain  and  grunts  of  satisfaction  or  dissatisfaction  ;  but 
these  are  isolated  and  incapable  of  much  further  development ; 
they  are  the  most  immutable  portions  of  language,  and  remain 
now  at  essentially  the  same  standpoint  as  thousands  of  years  ago. 

If  after  spending  some  time  over  the  deep  metaphysical  specula- 
tions of  a  number  of  German  linguistic  philosophers  j'ou  turn  to 
men  like  Madvig  and  Whitne}'',  5'^ou  are  at  once  agreeably  im- 
pressed by  the  sobriet}^  of  their  reasoning  and  their  superior  clearness 
of  thought.  But  if  you  look  more  closely,  you  caimot  help  thinldng 
that  they  imagine  our  primitive  ancestors  after  their  own  image 
as  serious  and  well-meaning  men  endowed  with  a  large  share  of 
common-sense.  By  their  laying  such  great  stress  on  the  com- 
munication of  thought  as  the  end  of  language  and  on  the  benefit 
to  primitive  man  of  being  able  to  speak  to  his  fellow-creatures 
about  matters  of  vital  importance,  they  leave  you  with  the  im- 
pression that  these  "  first  framers  of  speech  "  were  sedate  citizens 
with,  a  strong  interest  in  the  purely  business  and  matter-of-fact 
side  of  life  ;  indeed,  according  to  Madvig,  women  had  no  share 
in  the  creating  of  language. 

In  opposition  to  this  rationalistic  view  I  should  like,  for  once 
in  a  way,  to  bring  into  the  field  the  opposite  \dew  :  the  genesis 
of  language  is  not  to  be  sought  in  the  prosaic,  but  in  the  poetic 
side  of  life  ;  the  source  of  speech  is  not  gloomy  seriousness,  but 
merry  play  and  youthful  hilarity.  And  among  the  emotions 
which  were  most  powerful  in  eliciting  outbursts  of  music  and  of 
song,  love  must  be  placed  in  the  front  rank.  To  the  feeling  of  love, 
which  has  left  traces  of  its  vast  influence  on  countless  points  in 

28 


484  THE  ORIGIN  OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

the  evolution  of  organic  nature,  are  due  not  only,  as  Darwin  has 
shown,  the  magnificent  colours  of  birds  and  flowers,  but  also  many 
of  the  things  that  fill  us  with  joy  in  human  life  ;  it  inspired  many 
of  the  first  songs,  and  through  them  was  instrumental  in  bringing 
about  human  language.  In  primitive  speech  I  hear  the  laughing 
cries  of  exultation  when  lads  and  lasses  vied  with  one  another 
to  attract  the  attention  of  the  other  sex,  when  everybody  sang 
his  merriest  and  danced  his  bravest  to  lure  a  pair  of  eyes  to  throw 
admiring  glances  in  his  direction.  Language  was  born  in  the 
courting  days  of  mankind  ;  the  first  utterances  of  speech  I  fancy 
to  myself  like  something  between  the  nightly  love-lyrics  of  puss 
upon  the  tiles  and  the  melodious  love-songs  of  the  nightingale.^ 


XXL— §  13.  Primitive  Singing. 

Love,  however,  was  not  the  only  feeling  -sAliich  tended  to  call 
forth  primitive  songs.  Any  strong  emotion,  and  more  particularly 
any  pleasurable  excitement,  might  result  in  song.  Singing,  like 
any  other  sort  of  play,  is  due  to  an  overflow  of  energy,  which  is 
discharged  in  "  unusual  vivacity  of  every  kind,  including  vocal 
vivacity."  Out  of  the  full  heart  the  mouth  sings !  vSavages 
will  sing  whenever  they  are  excited  :  exploits  of  war  or  of  the 
chase,  the  deeds  of  their  ancestors,  the  coming  of  a  fat  dog,  any 
incident  "  from  the  arrival  of  a  stranger  to  an  earthquake  "  is 
turned  into  a  song  ;  and  most  of  these  songs  are  composed  extem- 

^  From  tlie  experience  I  had  with  my  previous  book.  Progress,  from 
which  this  chapter  has,  with  some  alterations  and  amphfications,  passed 
into  this  vohime,  I  feel  impelled  here  to  warn  those  critics  who  do  me  the 
honour  to  mention  my  theory  of  the  origin  of  language,  not  to  look  upon  it 
as  if  it  were  contained  simply  in  my  remarks  on  primitive  love-songs,  etc., 
and  as  if  it  were  based  on  a  priori  considerations,  like  the  older  speculative 
theories.  What  I  may  perhaps  claim  as  my  original  contribution  to  the 
solution  of  this  question  is  the  inductive  method  based  on  the  three  sources 
of  information  indicated  on  p.  416,  and  especially  on  the  '  backward  '  con- 
sideration of  the  history  of  language.  Some  critics  think  they  have 
demolished  my  view  by  simply  representing  it  as  a  romantic  dream  of  a 
primitive  golden  age  in  which  men  had  no  occupation  but  courting  and 
singing.  I  have  never  believed  in  a  far-off  golden  age,  but  rather  incline 
to  believe  in  a  progressive  movement  from  a  very  raw  and  barbarous  age 
to  something  better,  though  it  must  be  said  that  our  own  age,  with  its  national 
wars,  world  wars  and  class  wars,  makes  one  sometimes  ashamed  to  think 
how  little  progress  our  so-called  civilization  has  made.  But  primitive  ages 
were  probably  still  worse,  and  the  only  thing  I  have  felt  bold  enough  to 
maintain  is  that  in  those  days  there  were  some  moments  consecrated  to 
youthful  hilarity,  and  that  this  gave  rise,  among  other  merriment,  to  vocal 
play  of  such  a  character  as  closely  to  resemble  what  we  may  infer  from  the 
known  facts  of  linguistic  history  to  have  been  a  stage  of  language  earlier 
than  any  of  those  accessible  to  us.  There  is  no  '  romanticism  '  (in  a  bad 
sense)  in  such  a  theory,  and  it  can  only  bo  refuted  by  showing  that  the  view 
of  language  and  its  development  on  which  it  is  based  is  erroneous  from 
beginning  to  end. 


§18]  PRIMITIVE   SINGING  485 

pore.  "  Wlicn  rowing,  the  Coast  negroes  sing  eitlier  a  description 
of  some  love  intrigue  or  the  praise  of  some  woman  celebrated  for  her 
beauty."  The  Malay's  beguile  all  then*  leisure  hours  with  the 
repetition  of  songs,  etc.  "  In  singing,  the  East  African  contents 
himself  \vith  imjjrovising  a  few  words  without  sense  or  rime  and 
repeats  them  till  they  nauseate."  (These  quotations,  and  many 
others,  are  found  in  Herbert  Spencer's  Essay  on  the  Origin  of 
Musky  with  his  Postscript.)  The  reader  of  Karl  Bucher's  pains- 
taking work  Arbeit  %ind  Rhytlimus  (2te  aufl.  1899)  will  know  from 
liis  numerous  examples  and  illustrations  what  an  enormous  idle 
rhythmic  singing  plays  in  the  dail}'  life  of  savages  all  over  the 
world,  how  each  land  of  work,  especially  if  it  is  doTie  by  many 
jointly,  has  its  ovm.  kind  of  song,  and  how  nothing  is  done  except 
to  the  sound  of  vocal  music.  In  many  instances  savages  are 
mentioned  as  very  expert  in  adapting  the  subjects  of  their  songs 
to  current  events.  Nor  is  this  sort  of  singing  on  every  and  any 
occasion  confined  to  savages  ;  it  is  found  wherever  the  indoor 
life  of  ci\'ilization  has  not  killed  all  open-air  hilarity ;  formerly 
in  our  Western  Europe  people  sang  much  more  than  they  do  now. 
The  Swedish  peasant  Jonas  Stolt  (ab.  1820)  WTites  :  "I  have 
known  a  time  when  yoimg  people  were  singing  from  morning  till 
eve.  Then  they  were  carolling  both  out-  and  indoors,  behind  the 
plough  as  well  as  at  the  threshing-floor  and  at  the  spinning-wheel. 
This  is  all  over  long  ago  :  nowadays  there  is  silence  everywhere  ; 
if  someone  were  to  try  and  sing  in  our  days  as  we  did  of  old,  people 
would  term  it  bawling." 

The  first  things  that  were  expressed  in  song  were,  to  be  sure, 
neither  deep  nor  wise  ;  how  could  you  expect  it  ?  Note  the 
frequency  with  which  we  are  told  that  the  songs  of  savages  consist 
of  or  contain  totally  meaningless  syllables.  Thus  we  read  about 
American  Indians  that  "  the  native  word  which  is  translated 
'  song  '  does  not  suggest  any  use  of  words.  To  the  Indian,  the 
music  is  of  primal  importance ;  words  may  or  may  not  accompany 
the  music.  When  words  are  used  in  song,  they  are  rarelj'  employed 
as  a  narrative,  the  sentences  are  not  apt  to  be  complete  "  (Louise 
Pound,  Mod.  Lang.  Ass.  32.  224),  and  similarly  :  "  Even  where 
the  slightest  vestiges  of  epic  poetry  are  missing,  lyiic  poetry  of 
one  form  or  another  is  always  present.  It  may  consist  of  the 
musical  use  of  meaningless  sj'llables  that  sustain  the  song ;  or 
it  may  consist  largely  of  such  syllables,  with  a  few  interspersed 
■v^ords  suggesting  certain  ideas  and  certain  feelings  ;  or  it  may 
rise  to  the  expression  of  emotions  connected  with  warlike  deeds, 
with  religious  feeling,  love,  or  even  to  the  praise  of  the  beauties  of 
nature  "  (Boas,  International  Jonm.  Amer.  Ling.  1.  8).  The 
magic    incantations    of    the    Greenland    Eskimo,   according    to 


430  THE   ORIGIN  OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

W.  Thalbitzer,  contain  many  incomprehensible  words  never  used 
outside  these  songs  (but  have  they  ever  been  real  words  ?),  and 
the  same  is  said  about  the  mystic  religious  formulas  of  Maoris 
and  African  negroes  and  many  other  tribes,  as  well  as  about  the 
old  Roman  hymns  of  the  Arval  Brethren.  The  mere  joy  in  sonorous 
combinations  here  no  doubt  counts  for  very  much,  as  in  the 
splendid  but  meaningless  metrical  lists  of  names  in  the  Old 
Norse  Edda,  and  in  many  a  modern  refrain,  too.  Lot  me  give 
one  example  of  half  (or  less  than  half)  understood  strings  of 
syllables  fiom  "The  Oath  of  the  Canting  Crew"  (1749,  Farmer's 
Musa  Pedestris,  51)  : 

No  dimber,  dambler,  angler,  dancer, 

Prig  of  cackler,  prig  of  prancer  ; 

No  swigman,  swaddler,  clapper-dudgeon, 

Cadge-gloak,  curtal,  or  curmudgeon  ; 

No  whip-jack,  palliard,  patrico  ; 

No  jarkman,  be  he  high  or  low  ; 

No  dummerar  or  romany  .  .  . 

Nor  any  other  will  I  suffer. 

In  the  cultic  and  ceremonial  songs  of  savage  tribes  in  many 
parts  of  the  world  this  is  a  prominent  trait  :  it  seems,  indeed, 
to  be  universal.  Even  with  us  the  thoughts  associated  with 
singing  are  generally  neither  very  clear  nor  very  abstruse  ;  like 
humming  or  whistling,  singing  is  often  nothing  more  than  an 
almost  automatic  outcome  of  a  mood  ;  and  "  What  is  not  worth 
saying  can  be  sung."  Besides,  it  has  been  the  case  at  all  times 
that  things  transient  and  trivial  have  found  readier  expression 
than  Socratic  wisdom.  But  the  frivolous  use  tuned  the  instrument, 
and  rendered  it  little  by  little  more  serviceable  to  a  multiplicity 
of  purposes,  so  that  it  became  more  and  more  fitted  to  express 
everj'-thing  that  touched  human  souls. 

Men  sang  out  their  feelings  long  before  they  were  able  to  speak 
their  thoughts.  But  of  course  we  must  not  imagine  that  "  singing  " 
means  exactly  the  same  thing  here  as  in  a  modern  concert  hall. 
When  we  say  that  speech  originated  in  song,  what  we  mean  is 
merely  that  our  comparatively  monotonous  spoken  language  and 
our  highly  developed  vocal  music  are  differentiations  of  primitive 
utterances,  which  had  more  in  them  of  the  latter  than  of  the 
former.  These  utterances  were  at  first,  like  the  singing  of  birds 
and  the  roaring  of  many  animals  and  the  crying  and  crooning 
of  babies,  exclamative,  not  communicative — that  is,  they  came 
forth  from  an  inner  craving  of  the  individual  without  an}'  thought 
of  any  fellow-creatures.  Our  remote  ancestors  had  not  the  slight^est 
notion  that  such  a  thing  as  communicating  ideas  and  feelings  to 
someone  else  was  possible.     They  little  suspected  that  in  singing 


§18]  PRIMITIVE  SINGING  437 

as  nature  prompted  them  they  were  paving  the  way  for  a 
language  capable  of  rendering  minute  shades  of  thought ;  just 
as  thej-  could  not  suspect  that  out  of  their  coarse  pictures  of 
men  and  animals  there  should  one  day  grow  an  art  enabling  men 
of  distant  coimtrics  to  speak  to  one  another.  As  is  the  art  of 
writing  to  primitive  painting,  so  is  the  art  of  speaking  to  primitive 
singing.  And  the  development  of  the  two  vehicles  of  com- 
munication of  thought  presents  other  curious  and  instructive 
parallels.  Li  primitive  picture-^Titing,  each  sign  meant  a  whole 
sentence  or  even  more — the  image  of  a  situation  or  of  an  incident 
being  given  as  a  whole  ;  this  developed  into  an  ideographic 
WTiting  of  each  word  b}'  itself ;  this  system  was  succeeded  by 
S3'llabic  methods,  which  had  in  their  turn  to  give  place  to  alpha- 
betic wziting,  in  which  each  letter  stands  for,  or  is  meant  to 
stand  for,  one  sound.  Just  as  here  the  advance  is  due  to  a  further 
analysis  of  language,  smaller  and  smaller  units  of  speech  being 
progressively  represented  by  single  signs,  in  an  exactly  similar 
way,  though  not  quite  so  unmistakably,  the  history  of  language 
shows  us  a  progressive  tendency  towards  analyzing  into  smaller 
and  smaller  imits  that  which  in  the  earlier  stages  Avas  taken  as  an 
inseparable  whole. 

One  point  must  be  constantlj'  kept  in  mind.  Althougli  we 
now  regard  the  communication  of  thought  as  the  main  object 
of  speaking,  there  is  no  reason  for  thinking  that  this  has  always 
been  the  case  ;  it  is  ix?rfectl3^  possible  that  s^jeech  has  developed 
from  something  wliich  had  no  other  purpose  than  that  of  exercising 
the  muscles  of  the  mouth  and  throat  and  of  amusing  oneself  and 
others  by  the  production  of  i^leasant  or  possibly  only  strange 
sounds.  The  motives  for  uttering  sounds  may  have  changed 
entirely  in  the  course  of  centuries  without  the  speakers  being  at  any 
point  conscious  of  this  change  within  them. 

XXI.— §  14.  Approach  to  Language. 

We  get  the  first  approach  to  language  proper  when  com- 
municativeness takes  precedence  of  exclamativeness,  when  sounds 
are  uttered  in  order  to  '  tell  '  fellow-creatures  something,  as 
when  birds  warn  their  young  ones  of  some  imminent  danger.  In 
the  case  of  human  language,  communication  is  infinitely  more 
full  and  rich  and  elaborate  ;  the  question  therefore  is  a  very 
complex  one :  How  did  the  association  of  sound  and  sen.se  come 
about  ?  How  did  that  which  originallj'  was  a  jingle  of  meaningless 
sounds  come  to  be  an  instrument  of  thought  ?  How  did  man 
become,  as  Hnmboldt  has  somewhere  defined  him,  "  a  singing 
creature,  only  associating  thoughts  with  the  tones  "  ? 


438  THE   ORIGIN   OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

111  the  case  of  aji  onomatopoetic  or  echo-word  like  boiv-wow 
and  an  interjection  like  pooh-pooh  the  association  was  easy  and 
direct  ;  such  words  were  at  once  emploj'ed  and  understood  as 
signs  for  the  corresponding  idea.  But  this  was  not  the  case  with 
the  great  bulk  of  language.  Here  association  of  sound  with  sense 
must  have  been  arrived  at  by  devious  and  circuitous  ways,  which 
to  a  great  extent  evade  inquiry  and  make  a  detailed  exposition 
impossible.  But  this  is  in  exact  conformity  with  very  much 
that  has  taken  place  in  recent  periods  ;  as  we  have  learnt  in  previous 
chapters,  it  is  only  by  indirect  and  roundabout  ways  that  many 
Avords  and  grammatical  expedients  have  acquired  the  meanings 
they  now  have,  or  have  acquired  meaning  where  they  originally 
had  none.  Let  me  remind  the  reader  of  the  word  grog  (p.  308), 
of  interrogative  particles  (p.  358),  of  word  order  (p.  356),  of 
many  endings  (Ch.  XIX  §  13  £E.),  of  tones  (Ch.  XIX  §5),  of  the 
Frencli  negative  pas,  of  vowel -alternations  like  those  in  drink, 
drank,  drunk,  or  in  foot,  feet,  etc.  Language  is  a  complicated 
affair,  and  no  more  than  most  other  human  inventions  has  it 
come  about  in  a  simple  way :  mankind  has  not  moved  in  a 
straight  line  towards  a  definitely  perceived  goal,  but  has  muddled 
along  from  moment  to  moment  and  has  thereby  now  and  then 
stumbled  on  some  happj^  expedient  which  has  then  been  retained 
in  accordance  with  the  principle  of  the  sur\aval  of  the  fittest. 

We  may  perhaps  succeed  in  forming  some  idea  of  the  most 
primitive  process  of  associating  sound  and  sense  if  we  call  to  mind 
what  was  said  above  on  the  signification  of  the  earliest  words, 
and  try  to  fathom  what  that  means.  The  first  words  must  have 
been  as  concrete  and  specialized  in  meaning  as  possible.  Now, 
what  are  the  words  whose  meaning  is  the  most  concrete  and  the 
most  specialized  ?  Without  any  doubt  proper  names — that  is, 
of  course,  proper  names  of  the  good  old  Ijind,  borne  by  and  denoting 
only  one  single  individual.  How  easily  might  not  such  names 
spring  up  in  a  primitive  state  such  as  that  described  above  ! 
In  the  songs  of  a  particular  individual  there  would  be  a  constant 
recurrence  of  a  particular  series  of  sounds  sung  with  a  particular 
cadence  ;  no  one  can  doubt  the  possibility  of  such  individual 
habits  being  contracted  in  olden  as  well  as  in  present  times. 
Suppose,  then,  that  "  in  the  spring  time,  the  onlj^  prettj-  ring 
time  "  a  lover  was  in  the  habit  of  addressing  his  lass  "  with  a  hey, 
and  a  ho,  and  a  hey  nonino."  His  comrades  and  rivals  woald 
not  fail  to  remark  this,  and  would  occasionally  banter  him  by 
imitating  and  repeating  his  "  hey-and-a-ho-and-a-hey-nonino." 
But  when  once  this  had  been  recognized  as  what  Wagner  Avould 
term  a  ])orson'8  '  leitmotiv,'  it  would  be  no  far  cry  from  mimicking 
it  to   using  the   "  hey-and-a-ho-and-a-hey-nonino  "   as  a  sort  of 


§14]       APPROACH  TO  LANGUAGE        489 

nickname  for  the  man  concerned ;  it  might  be  employed,  for 
instance,  to  signal  liis  arrival.  And  when  once  proper  names 
had  been  bestowed,  common  names  (or  nouns)  \\ould  not  be  slow 
in  following  ;  we  see  the  transition  from  one  to  the  other  class  in 
constant  operation,  names  originally  used  exclusively  to  denote 
an  individual  being  used  metaphorically  to  connote  that  person's 
most  characteristic  peculiarities,  as  when  we  say  of  one  man  that 
he  is  a  '  Croesus  '  or  a  '  Vanderbilt  '  or  '  Rockefeller,'  and  of 
another  that  he  is  '  no  Bismarck.'  A  German  schoolboy  in 
the  'eighties  said  in  his  history  lesson  that  Hannibal  swore  he 
would  always  be  a  Frenchman  to  the  Romans.  This  is,  at  least, 
one  of  the  ways  in  which  language  arrives  at  designations  of  such 
ideas  as  'rich,'  'statesman'  and  'enemy.'  From  the  proper 
name  of  Ccesar  we  have  both  the  Russian  tsar'  and  the  German 
kaiser,  and  from  Karol  (Charlemagne)  Russian  koroV  '  king ' 
(also  in  the  other  Slav  languages)  and  Magyar  kirdly.  Besides 
being  designations  for  persons,  proper  names  may  also  in  some 
cases  come  to  mean  tools  or  other  objects,  originally  in  most  cases 
probably  as  a  term  of  endearment,  as  when  in  thieves'  slang  a 
crowbar  or  lever  is  called  a  betty  or  jemmy ;  E.  derrick  and  dirk, 
as  well  as  G.  dietrich,  Dan.  dirk,  Swed.  dyrk,  is  nothing  but 
Dietrich  {Derrick,  Theodoricus),  and  thus  in  innumerable  instances. 
In  the  Ecole  polytechnique  in  Paris  there  are  many  words  of  the 
same  character  :  bacha  '  cours  d'allemand  '  from  a  teacher,  M. 
Bacharach,  borius  '  bretelles  '  from  General  Borius,  malo  '  ^peron  ' 
from  Captain  Malo,  etc.  (MSL  15.  179).  Pamphlet  is  from  Pamphilet, 
originally  Pamphilus  seu  de  Amore,  the  name  of  a  popular 
booklet  on  an  erotic  subject.  Compare  also  the  history  of  the 
words  bluchers,  jack  (boot-jack,  jack  for  turning  a  spit,  a  pike,  etc., 
also  jacket),  pantaloon,  hansom,  boycott,  to  burke,  to  name  only 
a  few  of  the  best-loiov^Ti  examples. 

XXI.— §  15.  The  Earliest  Sentences. 

Again,  we  saw  above  that  the  further  back  we  went  in  the 
history  of  known  languages,  the  more  the  sentence  was  one  indis- 
soluble whole,  in  which  those  elements  which  we  are  accustomed 
to  think  of  as  single  words  were  not  yet  separated.  Now,  the 
idea  that  language  began  with  sentences,  not  with  words,  appears 
to  Whitney  {Am.  Journ.  of  Philol.  1.  338)  to  be,  "if  capable  of 
any  intelligent  and  intelligible  statement,  a  fortiori,  too  wild  and 
baseless  to  deserve  respectful  mention  "  (cf.  also  Mad\ig  Kl  85). 
But  the  absurdity  appears  only  if  we  think  of  sentences  like  those 
found  in  our  languages,  consisting  of  elements  (words)  capable 
of   being  used  in   other  combinations  and  there  forming  other 


440  THE   ORIGIN   OF  SPEECH  [ch.  xxi 

sentences:  this  seems  to  be  what  Gabelentz  (Spr  351)  imagines; 
but  it  is  not  so  wild  to  imagine  as  the  first  beginning  something 
which  can  be  translated  into  our  languages  by  means  of  a  sentence, 
but  which  is  not  '  articulated  '  in  the  same  way  as  such  a  sentence  ; 
we  translate  or  explain  the  dental  click  ('  tut  ')  by  means  of  the 
sentence  '  that  is  a  pity,'  but  the  interjection  is  not  in  other 
respects  a  grammatical  '  sentence.'  Or  we  may  take  an  illustration 
from  the  modern  use  of  a  telegraphic  code  :  if  suzaw  means  '  I 
have  not  received  your  telegram,'  or  sem2io  '  reserve  one  single 
room  and  bath  at  first-class  hotel  ' — we  have  unanalyzable  wholes 
capable  of  being  rendered  in  complete  sentences,  but  not  in  every 
way  analogous  to  these  sentences. 

Now,  it  is  just  units  of  this  character  (though  not,  of  course, 
with  exactly  the  same  kind  of  meaning  as  the  two  code  words) 
whose  genesis  Ave  can  most  easily  imagine  on  the  supi)Osition  of 
a  primitive  period  of  meaningless  singing.     If  a  certain  number 
of    people    have    together    witnessed    some    incident    and    have 
accompanied  it  with  some  sort  of  impromptu  song  or  refrain,  the 
two  ideas  are  associated,  and  later  on  the  same  song  will  tend  to 
call  forth  in  the  memor}^  of  those  who  were  present  the  idea  of  the 
whole  situation.     Suppose  some  dreaded  enemy  has  been  defeated 
and  slain ;  the  troop  will  dance  round  the  dead  body  and  strike 
up  a  chant  of  triumph,  say  something  like  '  Tarara-boom-de-ay  !  ' 
This  combination  of   sounds,  sung  to  a  certain  melodj',  will  now 
easily  become  what  might  be  called  a  proper  name  for  that  particular 
event ;    it  might  be  roughly  translated,   '  The  terrible  foe  fi'om 
beyond  the  river  is  slain,'  or  '  We  have  killed  the  dreadful  man 
from  beyond  the  river,'  or,  '  Do  you  remember  when  we  killed 
him  ? '   or  something  of  the   same  sort.     Under  slightly  altered 
circumstances  it  may  become  the  proper  name  of  the  man  who 
slew  the  enemy.     The  development  can  now  proceed  further  by 
a  metaphorical  transference  of  the  expression  to  similar  situations 
('  There  is  another  man  of  the  same  tribe  :    let  us  kill  him  as  wo 
did  the  first ! ')  or  by  a  blending  of  two  or  more  of  these  projDer- 
narae  melodies.     How  this  kind  of  blending  may  lead  to  the  de- 
velopment of  something  like  derivative  affixes  maj^  be  gathered 
from  our  chapter  on  Secretion  ;    it  may  also  result  in  parts  of 
the  whole  melodic  utterance  being  disengaged  as  something  more 
like  our  '  words.'     From  the  nature  of  the  subject  it  is  impossible 
to  give  more  than  hints,  but  I  seem  to  see  ways  by  which  primitive 
'  lieder  ohne  worte  '  may  have  become,  first,  indissoluble  rigmaroles, 
with  something  like  a  dim  meaning  attached  to  them,  and  then 
gradually  combinations  of  word-like  smaller  units,  more  and  more 
capable  of  being  analyzed  and  combined  with  others  of  the  same 
kind.    Anyhow,  this  theory  seems  to  explain  better  than   any 


§15]  THE   EARLIEST   SENTENCES  441 

other  the  great  part  which  fortuitous  coincidence  and  irregularity 
always  play  in  that  part  of  any  language  which  is  not  immediately 
intelligible,  thus  both  in  lexical  and  grammatical  elements. 

Primitive  iuan  came  to  attach  meaning  to  what  were  originally 
rambling  sequences  of  syllables  in  pretty  much  the  same  way 
as  the  child  comes  to  attach  a  meaning  to  many  of  the  words  he 
hears  from  his  elders,  the  whole  situation  in  which  they  are  heard 
giving  a  clue  to  their  interpretation.  The  difference  is  that  in 
the  latter  case  the  speaker  has  already  associated  a  meaning  with 
the  sound  ;  but  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  hearer  this  is  com- 
paratively immaterial  :  the  savage  of  a  far-distant  age  hearing 
some  syllables  for  the  first  time  and  the  child  hearing  them  nowa- 
days are  in  essentially  the  same  position  as  to  their  interpreta- 
tion. Parallels  are  also  found  in  the  words  of  the  mamma  class 
(Ch.  VIII  §  9),  in  which  hearers  give  a  signification  to  something 
pronounced  unintentionall}',  the  same  syllables  being  then  capable 
of  serving  afterwards  as  real  words.  If  one  of  our  forebears  on 
some  occasion  accidentally  produced  a  secjuence  of  sounds,  and 
if  the  people  around  him  were  seen  (or  heard)  to  respond  apprecia- 
tively, he  would  tend  to  settle  on  the  same  string  of  sounds  and 
repeat  it  on  similar  occasions,  and  in  this  way  it  would  gradually 
become  '  conventionalized  '  as  a  symbol  of  what  was  then  fore- 
most in  his  and  in  their  minds.  As  in  agriculture  primitive  man 
reaped  before  he  sowed,  so  also  in  his  vocal  outbm-sts  he  first 
reaped  understanding,  and  then  discovered  that  by  intentionally 
sowing  the  same  seed  he  was  able  to  call  forth  the  same  result. 
And  as  with  corn,  he  would  slowly  and  graduall}^  b}'  weeding 
out  (i.e.  by  not  using)  what  was  less  useful  to  him,  improve  the 
quality,  till  finally  he  had  come  into  possession  of  the  marvellous, 
though  far  from  perfect,  instrument  which  we  now  call  our 
language.  The  development  of  our  ordinary  speech  has  been 
largely  an  intellectualization,  and  the  emotional  quality  which 
played  the  largest  part  in  primitive  utterances  has  to  some 
extent  been  repressed ;  but  it  is  not  extinct,  and  still  gives  a 
definite  colouring  to  all  passionate  and  eloquent  speaking  and  to 
poetic  diction.  Language,  after  all,  is. an  art — one  of  the  finest 
of  arts. 

XXI.— §  16.  Conclusion. 

Language,  then,  began  with  half-musical  unanalyzed  expressions 
for  individual  beings  and  solitary  events.  Languages  comi^osed 
of,  and  evolved  from,  such  words  and  quasi -sentences  are  clumsy 
and  insufficient  instruments  of  thought,  being  intricate,  capricious 
and  difficult.    But  from  the  beginning  the  tendency  has  been 


442  THE   ORIGIN   OF  SPEECH  [en.  xxi 

one  of  progress,  slow  and  fitful  progress,  but  still  progress  towards 
gi'cater  and  greater  clearness,  regularity,  ease  and  j)liancy.  No 
one  language  has  arrived  at  perfection  ;  an  ideal  language  would 
always  ex])ress  the  same  thing  by  the  same,  and  similar  things 
by  similar  means  ;  any  irregularity  or  ambiguity  would  be  banished  ; 
sound  and  sense  would  be  in  perfect  harmony  ;  any  number  of 
delicate  shades  of  meaning  could  be  expressed  with  equal  ease  ; 
poetry  and  prose,  beauty  and  truth,  thinking  and  feeling  would 
be  equally  provided  for  :  the  human  spirit  would  Jiave  found  a 
garment  combining  freedom  and  gracefulness,  fitting  it  closely 
and  yet  allowing  full  plaj'  to  any  movement. 

But,  however  far  our  present  languages  are  from  that  ideal, 
we.  must  be  thankful  for  what  has  been  achieved,  seeing  that — 

Language  is  a  perpetual  orphic  song, 
Which  rules  with  Daedal  harmony  a  throng 
Of  thoughts  and  forms,  which  else  senseless  and  shapeless  were. 


INDEX 


a  Sanskrit,  52;  -a  in  foni.,  392; 
in  pi.,  394 

abbot,  15G 

ablaut,  see  apophony 

abstract  terms,  429 

accent,  see  stress  and  tone 

accusative,  name,  20 

actors,  276 

adaptation  of  suffixes,  38G  f. 

adjective  flexion,  129  ;  concord,  348  f. 

African  languages,  see  Bantu 

agglutination,  54,  58,  76,  376  ;  ag- 
glutination theory,  367  ff.,  376  fi. 

agreement,  see  concord 

ambiguities,  319,  341  ff. 

America,  race  mixtures,  203  ff. 

American  English,  260 

American  Indian  languages,  57,  181, 
187,  229,  233,  256,  334,  425,  427, 
430 

analogy,  70,  93  f.,  129  f.,  162  f.,  289 

analytic  languages,  36,  334  ff.,  422  ff. 

anatomical  causes  of  change,  255 

aphesis,  273 

apophony,  46,  53,  91  ff.,  311 

aposiopesis,  273 

appreciation  of  languages,  29  ff., 
57  f.,  60,  62,  319  £E.;  formula,  324 

archaic  forms,  294 

Armenian,   195  f. 

article,  378 

Aryan,  name,  63  f.  ;  languages,  pas- 
sim 

as,  root,  49 

AscoH,  192  ff. 

assimilation,  109,  168  f.,  264  f.,  280 

auxihary  words,  358 

babe,  157 
bacco,  171 

back-formations,   173,   178 
Balkan  tongues,  agreements,  215 
Bantu,  239,  352  ff.,  365 
-bar,  suffix,  377 
Basque,   210,  427 
Baudouin  de  Courtenay,  327 
Bavarian  ivost  bist,  281 
Beach-la-Mar,  216  ff. 
head,  175 
hhu,  root,  49 


bilinguism,  147  ff. 

biographical  or  biological  science  of 

language,  8 
blending,  132,  281  f.,  311,  312  f.,  390 
Bloomfield,  390 
boon,   175 
Bopp,  47  fi'.,  56  n. 
borrowing  of  words,  208 
hound,  176 
bow-wow  theory,  413 
boys,   146 

Bredsdorff,  43  n.,  70 
Bridges,  286 
BrOndal,  200 

Brugmann,  92  f.  ;  on  gender,  391 
Mibe,  157 
buncombe,  409 

cacuminals,   196 

Caribbean,  237  ff. 

Carlyle,  145 

case-system,  English,  268  ff.  ;  in  old 
languages,  337  ff.  ;  importance, 
341 

catch,  400 

ch  becomes  /,  168 

changes,  causes  of,  255  ff. 

child,  103  fi.  ;  sounds,  105  ;  under- 
standing, 113;  classification  of 
things,  114  f.;  vocabulary,  124; 
grammar,  128  ff.  ;  sentences,  133  ; 
echoism,  135  ;  why  learns  so  well, 
140  ;  influence  of  other  children, 
147  ;  word-invention,  151  ff.  ; 
influence  of,  161  ff.  ;  indirect  in- 
fluence, 178 ;  new  languages, 
180  ff. 

Chinese,  36,  54,  57,  286,  369  ff. 

Chinook,  228  flf. 

classification  of  languages,  35  f.,  54, 
76  ff. 

classifying  instinct,  388 

clicks,  415,  419 

climate,  256 

clippings,  see  stump-words 

coalescence  of  words,  174,  376  ff. 

Coeurdoux,  33 

CoUitz,  45  n.,  257,  381 

concord,  verbal,  335  ;  nominal,  348  ; 
in  Bantu,  352  ff. 


4«3 


444 


INDEX 


concrete  words,  429 

Ckindillac,  27 

confusion  of  words,  122,  172 

congeneric  groups,  389  f. 

conjugation,  see  verb 

consciousness,  130;  threshold  of,  138 

consonant-shift,  43  fi'.,  195,  197,  204, 

250.  258  f. 
contamination,  see  blending 
convergent  changes,  284  f. 
copula,  48  f. 

correctness,  latitude  of,  282  ff. 
creation  of  new  words,  151  ff. 
Creole,  2261?. 
cuckoo,  406 

cultural  loan-words,  209 
curry  favour,  173 
curtailing    of     words,    108,    1G9    £., 

328  f. 
Curtius,  83,  94 

•d  in  loved,  51,  381 

Darwin,  414 

dead  languages,  67 

decay,  55,  59,  62,  77,  319  ff. 

declension,  see  case-system 

Delbriick,  93,  96 

dialect,    study    of,    68 ;    spoken    by 

children,  147 
Diez,  85 

differentiations,   176,   272 
diminutives,  180,  402 
ding-dong  theory,  415 
divergent  changes,  288 
doublets,  272 

Dravidian  influence  on  Indian,  19G 
drunken  speech,  279 
dump,  313 

e  original  in  Aryan,  52,  91 

ease  theory,  261  ff. 

echoism,   135  ;  cf.  echo-words 

echo-words,  313,  398  ff. 

economizing  of  effort,  see  ease-theory 

effort  in  speaking,  261  fi.,  324  ff. 

eglino,  281 

emotion,  influence  on  sound,  276 

-en.  in  plural,  385 

ending,  see  flexion,  suffix 

English,  Grimm's  appreciation,  62  ; 
foreign  influence,  202,  210,  212  ff.  ; 
rapid  change,  261  ;  case-system, 
268  ff.  ;  future  tense,  274  ;  vowel- 
shift,  243,  284 ;  word-order,  344  f. ; 
genitive,  350 

entangling,  422 

equidistant  changes,  284 

•er  in  plural,  386 

estimation  of  languages,  see  appre- 
ciation 

Etruscan,  195 


etymology,  sound  laws,  295  ;  prin- 
ciples, 305  ff.  ;  object  of,  316  ; 
etymology  of  rag,  300 ;  of  sun, 
my,  see,  306  ;  of  krieg,  307  ;  of 
grog,  ganz,  308;  of  hope,  309;  of 
nut,  atumm,  311  ;  of  mais,  maar, 
men,  315  ;  of  moon,  daughter, 
mother,  318 

euphemism,  245  ff. 

euphony,  278 

exceptions  to  sound-laws,  296  ff. 

exertion  in  speaking,  261  ff.,  324  ff. 

expressive  sounds  preserved,  288 

extension  of  sound  laws,  290  ;  of 
suffixes,  386  ff. 

extra-lingual  influences,  278 

/  for  th,   167  ;  in  enough,  etc.,   168  ; 

in  Spanish,   193 
fable  in  Proto-Aiyan,  81 
fain,  175 

fashion  in  language,  291 
father,  117 
Feist,  194  ff. 
feminine,    391  ff.  ;    in    -i,    394,    402 ; 

cf.  woman 
Finnic,  197  f.,  207 
flexion,    35,    54  f.,    58  f.,    76  ff.,    79; 

origin  of,  377  ff. 
foreign  languages,  mistakes  in  noting 

down,  116  f.  ;  influence  of,  191  ff. 
forgetfulness,  176 
forms,  number  of,   332,   337  ;  origin 

of,  49,  58,  377  ff. 
French    influence    on    English,    202, 

209,    214  ;    pronouns   and   verbs, 

422  f. 
frequency,     influence     on     phonetic 

development,  267 
■ful,  suffix,  376 

Gabelentz,  98,  369 

ganz,  308 

gape,  288 

gender,  346  f.,  391ft". 

general  and  specific  terms,  274, 
429  f. 

genitive,  name,  20 ;  group,  351  ; 
s  in,  382,  383  n. 

geographical  distribution  of  lan- 
guages, 187  ;  influence  on  change, 
256 

German  language,  appreciation  of, 
29,  31,  60;  sound-shift,  43  ff., 
195  f.,  283  ;  forms,  341  ff.  ;  word- 
order,  344 

Germanic,  see  Gothonic 

gibberish,  149  f. 

girls,  146 

gleam,  gloom,  401 

glottogonic  theoriea  abandoned,  96 


INDEX 


445 


Qothonic  (Germanic,  Teutonic),  42  ; 
sound-shift,  see  consonant-shift 

gradation,  see  apophony 

grammar,  children's,  128  ff.  ;  foreign 
influence,  213  ;  of  primitive  lan- 
guages, 421 

grammatical  elements,  origin,  48, 
58,  61 

Greek  linguistic  speculation,  19  f.  ; 
vowels,  91  ;  personal  pronouns, 
286  n.  ;  Modern  Greek,  301 

Grimm,  37,  40  ff.,  60  ff. 

Grimm's  Law,  43  f.  ;  see  consonant- 
shift 

grog,  308 

group  genitive,  129,  351  ;  groups  of 
words  with  similar  meaning,  389 

h  for  /  in  Spanish,  193  ;  for  3,  etc., 

263 
habaidedeima,  322,  329,  331  f. 
Hale,  181  ff. 
haplology,  281,  329 
harmony  of  vowels,  280 
Hebrew,  21 
Hegel,  72  f. 
Hempl,  201  ff. 
Herder,  27  f. 
hereditary   aptness   for  a  language, 

75,  141 
Hermann,  48 
Hervas,  22 
Herzog,  164  f. 
hide,  121 

Hirt,  192,  203  f.,  382  f. 
historical  point  of  view,  32,  42 
homophones,  285  f. 
■hood,  suffix,  376 
hope,  309 

humanization  of  language,  327  f. 
Humboldt,   55  ff. 
hypercorrect  forms,  294 

I,  the  pronoun,  123  f. 

i  denoting  small,  feminine,  near,  402 

idioms,  139 

imitation,  291  ff.  ;  of  somids,  398, 
413  f. 

imperative,  403 

incorporation,  58,  79,  425 

Indian  grammarians,  20  ;  cacuminals, 
196  ;  of.  Amex'ican  Indian,  San- 
skrit 

indirect  ways  of  obtaining  expres- 
sions, 438 

indissoluble  expressions  of  several 
ideas,  334,  422  ft.,  428  ff. 

Indo-European  (Indo-Germanic),  see 
Aryan 

indolence,  see  ease-theory 

inflexion,  see  flexion 


interjections,  414 

interrogative  sentences,  137 ;  par- 
ticles, 358 

invention  of  words,  151  ff. 

irregularities  in  old  languages,  338  f., 
379,  425 

isolating  languages,  36,  76,  366  £f. 

Japanese,  243 
jaw-breakers,  280 
jaw-measurements,  104 
Jenisch,  29  H. 
Johannson,  341  ff. 
Jones,  William,  33 
[ju],  290  f. 

Karlgren,  372  f. 

Keltic  languages,   38,   39,   53  ;  sub- 
stratum, 192  ff. 
Kuhn,  371 
kw  becomes  p,  168 

languages,  rise  of  new,  180  ff. 

language-teaching,  145 

lapses,  279 

Latin,  study  of,  22  f.  ;  influence,  209, 

215;    forms,    334,    338  f.,    343; 

word-order,  350 
latitude  of  correctness,  282 
law    as    applied    to    sound -changes, 

297 
leaps  in  phonetic  development,  167  ; 

in  meanings,  175 
Leibniz,  22 
lengthening,    emotional,    277,    403 ; 

of  words,  330 
Lenz,  204 
Lepsius,   370 
Leskien,  93 

life  as  applied  to  language,  7 
lingua  geral,  234 
linguistics,  position  of,  64  f.,  73,  86, 

97 
little,  407 

little  language,  103,  106,  144,  147 
living  languages,  study  of,  97 
loan-words,  sound-substitution,  207  ; 

general     theory,     208 ;     culture, 

209;  classes,  211  ;  with  symbolic 

sounds,  409 
loss  of  sounds,  108,  168,  328  f. 
love-songs,  433  f. 
Luxemburg,  bilinguism  in,  148 
•ly,  suffix,  377 

m  in  adversative  conjunctions,  314  ff.; 

case-ending,  382 
ma,  maar,  314  f. 
Madvig,  84,  433 
magis,  mais,  314  f. 
makeshift  languages,  232  ff. 


446 


INDEX 


mamma y   154  ff. 

man  and  woman,  142,  237  ff. 

Mauritius  Creole,  22G  ff. 

meaning,  delimitation  of,  118  f.; 
worda  of  opposite  meaning,  120; 
words  with  several  meanings, 
121  ;  shifting  of  meaning,  174  ; 
cf.  semantic  changes 

meaningless  gibberish,  149  f.;  sing- 
ing, 43G 

Meillet,  55,   198  f. 

memory,  children's,   143 

men,  315 

mental  states,  worda  for,  401 

Meringer,  lG2f.,  280,  291 

metanalysis,   173 

metaphors,  431 

metathesis,   108,  281 

Meyer-Benfey,  256 

milk,   158 

Misteli,  79 

misunderstandings,  282,  286  f.,  319 

mixed  languages,  191  ff. 

modem  languages,  study  of,  68  ; 
compared  with  ancient,  322  ft. 

Mailer,  H.,   139,  308,  382 

mon,  358 

monosyllabic  languages,  36,  307  U, 

month,  318 

moods,  380 

moon,   318 

mother,  155,  318 

mother-tongue,  146 

movement,  words  denoting,  399 

mountains,  linguistic  changes  in, 
256  f. 

mouth-filling  words,  403 

Miiller,  Friedrich,  79,  338 

Midler,  Max,  88  ff.,  414 

Murray,   269 

iTiutation,  37,  46 

mutilation  of  lips,  256  ;  of  words,  266 

my,  384  f. 

-n  in  mine,  384  f. 

names  of  relations,  118  ;  proper,  439 

nasalis  sonans,  92,  317  f. 

national  psychology,  258 

negation,  136  ;  redundant,  352 

neo -grammarians,  see  young-gram- 
marians 

new  languages,  180  ff. 

Noir6,  415 

nominal  forms,  337  ff.  ;  concord, 
348  ff. 

number  in  verbs,  335  ;  in  pronouns, 
347  ;  in  nouns,  129,  349,  355,  385, 
394  f. 

numerals,  119 ;  borrowed,  211 ;  in  sue* 
cession,  281  ;  distinct  for  various 
classes,  430 


nursery  language,  179 
nui,  311 

0  original  in  Arj'^an,  52,  91 

old  languages  compared  with  modern, 

322  ff. 
on,  287 
oncle,  271  n. 

onomatopa?ia,   150,  313,  398  ff. 
opposite  meaning,  120 
order  of  words,  see  word-order 
organism,  language  as  an,  7,  65 
organs    of    speech,    used    for    other 

purposes,  278  ;  development,  410, 

430 
orient,   175 
origin  of  language,  26  ff.,  61,  412  ff.  ; 

of  grammatical  elements,   367  ft". 
Osthoff,  93 
ox,  oxen,  385 

palatal  law,  90  f. 

Panini,  20 

pap,  158 

papa,    154  ff. 

parenthesizing,  350  f. 

passive,  Scandinavian,  50,  377 ; 
Latin,  50,  381 

patter,  407 

Paul,  94  f.,  102 

periods  of  rapid  change,  259 

personal  forms  in  verbs,  53,  335,  383 

pet-names,  108,  109 

philology,   04  f.,   97 

phonetic  laws,  see  sound  changes, 
sound  laws 

Pidgin-Enghsh,  221  ff. 

pittance,  408 

Plato,  19,  390 

playfulness,  148,  298  f.,  432  ff. 

plumbum,  plummet,  plunge,  313  f. 

plural,  sec  number 

poetry,  300,  431  f. 

polysynthetic,  423,  425 

pooh-pooh  theor}',  414 

2iope,  156 

popular  etymology,  122 

portmanteau  words,  313 

possessive  pronouns,   384  f. 

prepositions,  137  f.  ;  borrowed,  211 

prescriptive  grammar,  24 

preterit,  weak,  61,  381 

primitive  languages,  417  ff. 

progressive  tendency,  319  ff. 

pronouns,  123;  borrowed,  212;  pos- 
sessive, 384  ;  French,  422 

proper  names,  436 

prosiopesis,   273 

Proto- Aryan,  80  f.,  90  f. 

punning  phrases,  300 

pupil,  157 


INDEX 


447 


puppet,   157 
Puscaiiu,  205 

question,  137  ;  word-order  and  aux- 
iliaries, 357  fE. 
quick,  407 

r  in  Latin  passive,  381  ;  soiuid  of  r 

weakened,  24-t ;  r-  and  n-  stems, 

339,  390 
race  and  language,  75  ;  race-mixture, 

201  ff. 
rapidity  of  change,  259 
Rapp,  68  ff. 
Kask,  3Gff.,  43,  46 
rational,  everything  originally  r.,  316 
reaction  against  change,  293 
reconstruction,  80  ff.,  317 
reduplication,   109,   169 
relationship   between  languages,   38, 

53;  terms  of,  117,  154  ff. 
right,  180 
roll,  374,  408 
Romanic     languages,      202,      205  f., 

234  ff.,  260;  future,  378 
root-determinatives,  311 
roots,  52,  367  ff.,  373  ff. 
Rousseau,  26 

*  in  passive,  50,  377,  381  ;  case- 
ending,  213,  381  ff.  ;  in  English 
plural,  214  ;  in  Russian  and 
Spanish,  266  ;  Latin  disappears, 
362 

Sandfeld,  215 

Sanskrit,  33,  67  ;  vowels,  52,  90  f.  ; 
consonants,  90  f.,  196 ;  drama, 
241  f. 

savages,  languages  of,  417,  426  ff. 

saving  of  effort,  of  space,  of  time, 
264 

Scandinavian  influence  on  English, 
212,  214;  passive,  50,  377; 
article,  378 

Scherer,  96 

Schlegel,  A.  W.,    36 

Schlegel,  F.,  34  f. 

Schleicher,  71  ff. 

Schuchardt,  191,  213,  219,  267 

scorn,  words  expressive  of,  401 

Scotch,  193  n. 

screaming,   103 

secondary  echoism,  406 

secret  languages,  149  f. 

secretion,  384  ff. 

semantic  changes,  174  f.,  274  ff. 

Semitic,  36,  52 

sentences,  133  ;  the  earliest,  439  ff.  ; 
sentence  stress,  272 

separative  linguistics,  67 

seqw;  306  f. 


sex,  146,  237  ff. ;  cf.  gender 
shifters,  123 

shortening,  328  f.  ;  cf.  stump-words, 
signification,       how       apprehended, 

113  ff.  ;  cf.  semantic  changes 
significative  sounds  preserved,  267  f., 

271,  287 
similarities  cause  confusion,   120  f. 
simplification,  332  ff, 
singing,  420,  432  ff. 
slang,  247,   299  f. 
small,  words  for,  402 
smile,  278 
so,  250 

Societe  de  Lingnistique,  96,  412 
son,  E.,  120,  286 
songs,  primitive,  420,  432  ff. 
sound  changes,  passim  ;  see  especially 

161  ff.,   191  ff.,  242  ff.,  255  ff. 
sound  laws,  93;  in  children,  100  f.  ; 

extension     and     metamorphosis, 

290  ;  destructive,  289  ;  spreading, 

291  ;  in  the  science  of  etymology, 
295  ff. 

sound-shift,  Gothonic,  see  consonant- 
shift 
special    terms    in    primitive    speech, 

429  ff. 
speed  of  utterance,  258 
spelling  pronunciations,  294 
splitting,  see  differentiation 
Spoonerism,  280 

stable  and  unstable  soimds,  199  f. 
Steinthal,  79,   87 
strengthening  of  somids,  404  f. 
stress,    Aryan,    93  ;    Gothonic,    195  ; 

nature  and  influence  of,  271  ff. 
stumm,  311 

stump-words,  108,  169  f. 
substantive,  see  nominal  and  flexion 
substratum  theory,  191  ff. 
subtraction,   173 
suffixes,     origin,     376  f.  ;    extension, 

386  f.  ;  tainting,  388 
suggestiveness,  408  ;  cf.  symbolism 
suppletivwesen,  426 
Sweet,  97,  161,  264 
syllables,  number  of,  330 
symbolism,  396  ff. 
syntax,    66,    95  ;    foreign    influence, 

214;  blends,  282;  simplification, 

340 
synthetic    languages,    36,     334     ff., 

421  f. 

ta,  159 

tabu,  239  ff.,  431 

tainting  of  suffixes,  388 

tata,  158 

■teer,  suffix,  388 

Telugu,  301 


44d 


INDEX 


tempo,  258 

Teutonic,  see  Cothonic 

th  becomes/,  v,  167 

they  for  he  or  she,  347 

this  and  that,  403 

Thomsen*  90  n.,  267,  427 

threshold,  under  the,  138 

ti,  358  f. 

time,  a  child's  conception  of,  120 

tone,   111;  in  Chinese,  369,  370  ;  in 

Danish  dialect,  371  ;  in  primitive 

languages,  419 
Tooke,  Home,  49 
translation-loans,  215 
translators  introduce  foreign  words, 

210 
tripos,   115 
twins     having     separate     language. 

185  f. 

«,  French,  192  ff.  ;  English,  290  f. 
umlaut,   37 

understanding,  a  baby's,   113f. 
units  of  language,  422 

value,  influence  on  phonetic  develop- 
ment, 266  ff. 

verb,  substantive,  48  ;  flexional 
forms,  130  ;  simplification,  332  ff.  ; 
concord,  335 

verbal  character  of  roots,  374  f. 

Verner,  93;  Verner's  Law,  195, 
197  f. 


vocabulary,    extent    of,    124  ff.  ;    in 

primitive  speech,  429 
voicing   of   consonants,   in   Gothonic 

and  English,   198  ;  symbolic,  405 
vowel-harmony,  280 
vowels,  number  of  Aryan,  44,  52,  91 
vulgar  speech,  261,  299 

wars,  influence  on  language,  260 

weak  preterit,  51,  381 

weakening  of  words,  266 

Wossely,   197 

Wheeler,  293 

Whitney,  88,  323,  367 

Windisch,  208 

women   as   language   teachers,    142  ; 

women's  language,   237  ff. 
word,    what    constitutes    one.     125, 

422  f. 
word-division,  a 32,  173  f. 
word-formation,   131  ;   of.   invention, 

suffixes 
word-order,      344  ff.,      355  ff.  ;      in 

Chinese,  369  ff. 
worthless  words  or  sounds,  266  ff. 
Wundt,  98,  258 

yesterday,  120 
yo-he-ho  theory,  415 
you  for  /,  124 
5'oung-grammaiians,  93 

Zulu,  see  Bantu 


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